Texas school district sees efficiency gains with e-procurement
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At a time when shrinking budgets are impacting school closures in the state, the Arlington Independent School District has turned to tech to better manage spending.
In Texas, multiple school districts are preparing to close campuses due to budget deficits. That’s why the Arlington Independent School District in the state has turned to tech to help better manage school expenditures and improve cost efficiencies.
The Arlington Independent School District, or ISD, houses about 54,000 students across 76 campuses, making it one of Texas’s largest school districts. It offers gifted and talented services for students, an award-winning special education program and several extracurricular programs, meaning school authorities have a plethora of supplies and resources to maintain.
Historically, procuring those goods has been a laborious, time-consuming procedure, said Lisa Phillips, director of purchasing at Arlington Independent School District. But for nearly a decade, the school district has been transforming its manual, paper-based procurement system into a digital ecosystem, leveraging cloud-enabled software from Euna Solutions since 2016.
Previously, officials could easily receive hundreds of bid documents from vendors that staff had to sift through to tabulate, deciphering strangers’ handwriting or trying to read past coffee stains on the paper, Phillips explained. Plus, documents were sent through traditional mail, increasing the risk of papers getting lost in transit or being submitted late, prohibiting authorities from accepting those submissions.
The digital transformation has brought significant cost and time savings for Arlington ISD staff, Phillips said, which is particularly helpful as “the legislature is out right now discussing [if] we will receive extra funding.”
Last year, the district saw more than $36,000 in cost savings after adopting an artificial intelligence-enabled savings advisor tool. Once a user selects a product or service they want to purchase, for example, the AI service can identify if there is a vendor offering the same thing at a lower cost.
Additionally, the digital procurement system “allows us to predict how our spending will be [in the] future,” Phillips said. For instance, clerks can evaluate if schools are stockpiling on office supplies or requesting large purchases at the end of the school year to alter spending behaviors to be more efficient.
The modernized system has also expanded the school district’s supplier base by 1,780% between 2022 and 2024, and has helped expedite the onboarding process for vendors from months or a year to minutes.
Another area Arlington ISD has seen efficiency gains is in invoice processing, which has increased in speed tenfold after the school district integrated an automated invoice-to-payment service in 2023. The system also sends clerks automated notices of contracts that need to be renewed or recompeted soon so they can stay on track collaborating with vendors.
“In the public sector, you’re asked to do more with less all the time,” Phillips said. “We’re accountable to taxpayers, so nothing is free and we have to work harder with what we have.” Products like digital bid and procurement management systems “allow us to do that,” she said.