Tentative Agenda

A panel discussion will share insight into various levels of PCard Program development. It will identify common challenges and strategies for incorporating technology to help grow an underperforming PCard Program.

TBD

As higher education becomes increasingly decentralized, procurement leaders are being asked to do more than process transactions. They are being asked to create visibility, guide decision-making, support compliance, and help institutions make better choices before commitments are made. This interactive roundtable session explores how institutions can transform fragmented demand into meaningful direction. Through facilitated discussions focused on intake, routing, approvals, visibility, and supplier guidance, participants will examine where critical signals are lost, where opportunities for influence exist, and how procurement can create greater clarity across the purchasing lifecycle. Attendees will contribute their own experiences, identify emerging practices, and participate in group report-outs that capture actionable ideas for improving institutional visibility, stakeholder experience, and operational effectiveness. Because when demand is structured, understood, and guided effectively, procurement moves beyond transaction management and becomes a source of institutional intelligence.

When disaster strikes, is your institution prepared to rapidly secure essential supplies while maintaining procurement compliance and cost controls? Join University leaders and Amazon Business experts as we build on the fall webinar about crisis-ready procurement, exploring how colleges and universities have taken steps to develop comprehensive crisis procurement strategies that balance speed, compliance, and pricing. What you'll learn during this session:

• Building a flexible crisis procurement framework that enables rapid response when campus emergencies arise while maintaining institutional controls
• Reducing supply chain risks and scaling purchasing capacity during critical situations through strategic planning and preparedness
• Leveraging Amazon Business pricing levers with curated catalogs
• Discover how enabling specialized collections like Disaster Supplies unlocks pre-negotiated pricing on essential items, allowing your institution to secure competitive rates on critical supplies while maintaining budget discipline during high-pressure situations
• Implementing real-time spend visibility and cost control tools that ensure fiscal accountability even when procurement timelines compress
• Communicating effectively with stakeholders during supply chain disruptions to maintain transparency and confidence
• Conducting post-crisis assessment and reporting to identify lessons learned and strengthen your procurement resilience for future emergencies Amazon Business curated catalogs provide institutions with streamlined access to pre-vetted emergency essentials while delivering pricing advantages specifically designed for educational procurement.

By understanding how these pricing levers work within curated collections, your team can respond to crises with both speed and cost efficiency‚ ensuring your institution protects its community without compromising financial stewardship. Join us to discover how Amazon Business can serve as your strategic partner in building a more resilient and price conscious procurement operation.

TBD

Let's face it: vendor management in higher ed isn't complicated because the tasks are impossibly hard; it's complicated because it requires collaboration across functional teams. Without an established framework, our "day jobs" will always win and that's exactly how we waste resources every year. But here is the good news: you don't need a massive budget or a dozen new hires to fix this! You can build an effective (even virtual) vendor management program across your organization that improves your institution's financial and strategic position by establishing a repeatable, end-to-end lifecycle process that can be broken down into manageable components. In this panel session, we'll share ideas and tactics for putting vendor management practices into place to optimize the people and expertise you already have to improve your procurement strategies and generate savings for the institution. You'll walk away with actionable examples to ensure vendor management doesn't become everyone's second priority and ultimately, nobody's priority.

In the rapidly evolving landscape of Higher Ed, procurement is no longer just a back-office function, it is a mission-critical frontier. This session charts the journey of Georgetown University s Procure-to-Pay transformation, framed through a unique career trajectory spanning the high-stakes federal rigor of NASA and USAID to the customer-centric speed of Amazon. By moving beyond the binary of "compliance vs. convenience," explore how curiosity allows us to challenge the status quo, and how discovery, fueled by data, uncovers opportunities to raise the procurement bar. Attendees will learn how to bridge the gap between rigorous oversight and private-sector agility, turning the procurement department into an engine that delivers value directly to the researcher s front door. Join us to transition your team from passive order takers to indispensable strategic partners in the academic mission.

TBD

TBD

Higher education procurement teams are often viewed as transactional gatekeepers rather than strategic partners. At the same time, decentralized purchasing, evolving technology, increased compliance requirements, and staffing turnover have made it more important than ever for campus stakeholders to understand how and why procurement processes work. This interactive workshop invites participants to collaboratively design a Procurement 101 program intended for non-procurement campus customers including faculty, administrative staff, business officers, and departmental purchasers. Rather than presenting a completed institutional model, this session is designed as a facilitated working session where attendees will share challenges, brainstorm ideas, and build practical frameworks together that can be adapted to their own campuses. Through guided discussion and group activities, participants will explore what campus customers most need to understand about procurement, why procurement processes often create frustration or confusion, and how procurement teams can improve communication, transparency, and customer relationships. Attendees will work together to identify potential training topics, delivery methods, branding approaches, and engagement strategies that help position procurement as a trusted campus partner rather than simply a compliance function. Topics may include procurement literacy, decentralized purchasing challenges, supplier and contract risks, customer experience, technology and workflow considerations, and methods for reducing friction through proactive education and communication. Participants will leave with practical ideas, peer-driven strategies, and a foundational framework they can use to begin developing or enhancing procurement education initiatives at their institutions. This workshop is intended to evolve through collaboration and shared experiences across the NAEP community. The facilitators hope to offer the session at multiple NAEP regional conferences during the fall, using participant feedback, discussion outcomes, and workshop activities to further develop the concept and identify common themes, challenges, and best practices across institutions. The collective ideas and materials generated through these regional sessions would then be synthesized into a summary framework, toolkit, and set of recommended practices to be presented at the NAEP National Conference in Nashville in the spring, showcasing a community-driven approach to building procurement education programs in higher education.