University of Pennsylvania: An Integrated Approach to Software

Click here to receive your FREE subscription to Campus Technology

Home > University of Pennsylvania: An Integrated Approach to Software

Features

University of Pennsylvania: An Integrated Approach to Software

4/29/2003

An integrated, Web-based financial and eCommerce system dubbed BEN, which is short for Business Enterprise Network (and coined after the university's founding father, Benjamin Franklin), has made it possible for the University of Pennsylvania (Penn) to realize savings of more than $64.8 million in the purchase of products and services. With BEN, the university has integrated and consolidated its purchasing, accounts payable, and general ledger processes among 12 decentralized, semi-autonomous schools and 20 disparate business units, allowing Penn to save millions of dollars in procurement costs and overhead.

Laying the Groundwork
Penn turned to Oracle Corp. in 1996, when it implemented Oracle Financials, a software application suite that manages and automates a company's financial processes. Oracle Financials laid the groundwork for what would evolve into BEN six years later. Based on its success with Oracle Financials and the Oracle Database, which serves as the technological foundation for BEN, Penn decided to leverage its existing Oracle investment with the implementation of Oracle iProcurement in January 2002. Penn also introduced the Penn Marketplace, a private online supplier exchange, at this time.

Penn Marketplace
Before the implementation of Oracle Financials, Penn's more than 1,700 administrative staff members and researchers used paper-based requisitions to buy everything from paper and pens to chemicals and microscopes from any local or nationwide supplier. The purchase requisition would change hands multiple times before the actual purchasing occurred. Additionally, because purchasing was not linked to accounting, purchase orders needed to be manually checked against invoices. With this fragmentation in purchasing power came ever-widening chasms of inefficiencies and increasing purchasing costs—and the determination to find a solution, which led to the creation of BEN.

At the heart of BEN is the Penn Marketplace, which allows Penn employees to search dozens of supplier catalogs and complete purchases using a Web browser. The Penn Marketplace currently contains over 550,000 products from 31 of the university's preferred contract suppliers.

Using the Penn Marketplace, users quickly find goods and services, add them to an electronic shopping cart, and follow a simple checkout process to make the purchases. Behind the scenes, requisitions are electronically routed, approved, and turned into paperless purchase orders. Purchase orders are then forwarded electronically to the suppliers via electronic data interchange (EDI) or auto fax, and invoices are received electronically via EDI or submitted directly to the university's accounts payable department for document imaging, closing the loop on the procurement cycle.

"Our previous purchasing process involved a lot of paper and a lot of manual data entry," explains Stephen Stines, senior IT director for Penn. "Now the entire purchase-to-pay process is automated. Our new system automatically routes requisitions to the appropriate approvers, freeing up time and allowing our staff to be more productive in their jobs. Invoices from suppliers are matched to purchase orders and scheduled for payment—automatically."