Tentative Agenda

Customer service is key for students coming to our universities, but for procurement teams our direct customers are internal to our institutions. This often neglected area provides opportunities for growth for individuals and allows departments to change the narrative that procurement is the problem to it being a problem solver.

Learn how to get started auditing your card program when you have a small team, a small budget, and very little experience. This session will give you tips, ideas, and tools to dive into those numbers and produce results.

To present ITN sourcing as another option for the solicitation of construction projects. To present the experience USF has had in this area and to exchange ideas for improvement with my peers.

A crash course on how to make the most of your conference experience. Tips and tried and true recommendations on how to interact with your peers, seek out colleagues from aspiring institutions that you can learn from, and build connections and have meaningful interactions with suppliers. Tips on how to prepare in advance for the conference and how to make intentional and meaningful engagement during your conference experience. Walk away with a guide on how to bring back actionable items and relationships that foster growth for you and your team and make an impression on how you view conferences and face-to-face learning opportunities going forward.

This facilitated roundtable explores current construction procurement challenges facing public higher education institutions and highlights practical strategies procurement professionals are using to improve outcomes. Through peer-driven discussion, participants will examine project readiness, delivery method selection, risk allocation, staffing capacity, and compliance defensibility, focusing on solutions that can be implemented within existing university structures.

Move beyond AI theory and put it to work. This 60-minute interactive workshop equips public-sector procurement professionals with practical skills to use AI for real-world challenges: drafting scopes of work, developing evaluation criteria, conducting market research, analyzing contract risks, and crafting vendor communications. Participants will work in small groups using AI tools (ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini, or others allowed by their institutions) to solve authentic procurement scenarios. Groups tackling the same problem will compare their prompts, outputs, and approaches, revealing how prompt design shapes results and where human judgment remains essential. You'll learn the RCCF prompt engineering framework, practice iterative refinement, identify the "plausibility trap" in AI outputs, and develop take-home workflows you can apply the next day. No advanced technical skills required. This session welcomes all experience levels and emphasizes critical evaluation and responsible AI use in a public-sector context. Bring your laptop, your procurement challenges, and your curiosity. Leave with practical tools and confidence to integrate AI into your daily work.

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.

Category Management is an increasingly popular concept for Procurement Departments who are looking to become more strategic, data-driven and effective. But what exactly does it entail, and how can you put it into place at an educational institute where resources are limited, procurement is decentralized, and priorities are ever-shifting? In this session, we will dive into a real-world case study of how the University of South Florida transitioned to a Category Management model, transforming its structure and operating model to deepen expertise, add value to our departmental relationships, more effectively manage supplier relationships, and elevate Procurement s profile across campus. This presentation will cover: What is category management, and why should you care? Assessing readiness and getting buy-in: Making the case to leadership Evaluating team structure and skills The importance of spend data, and how to improve it Developing tools and templates Steps to implementing category management: Establishing scope Collecting and analyzing data Identifying and engaging with stakeholders What a good category strategy looks like Common issues and lessons learned Encountering resistance and meeting people where they are at Upskilling and retraining team members Identifying quick wins and demonstrating early success By the end of the presentation, attendees should have a good understanding of what category management is and a roadmap for implementation, along with some tips and hard-learned lessons of how they can overcome common challenges. There will be opportunities for questions and feedback both during the presentation and at the end.

How CLM data (contract metadata, renewals, obligations) can support strategic sourcing, supplier relationships, and cost-saving strategies.

This session will be aimed to present the low-cost, beginner friendly business process automations available through Microsoft's Power Automate and how AI can be integrated to increase AP and Procurement efficiency. I will be introducing Power Automate and our AI integration partners before demonstrating some of the various methods in which Vanderbilt University has incorporated these technologies into our Procurement and AP departments. Some of the automation processes to be presented will include: -Invoice Text Scanning and Processing -Automated Email Categorization, Sorting, and Triage -Automated Supplier Goods and Services Categorization and Dashboarding -Contract Request Ticketing -And More! We will be diving into these automation processes to help illustrate the possibilities in the Procurement space for inexpensive, yet effective, improvements to our daily workflows. The lecture will include live demonstrations and in-depth insights on how these processes were ideated, created, and the impact they have had since incorporation. Attendees should be able to leave this session with the inspiration for new Automated Procurement Processes and the confidence they the can go and build them for themselves.

A conversation about challenges, successes, and unique benefits of two college/university campuses in the same town, managed separately by a married couple with combined 60 years of experience in higher ed procurement.  The presenters will talk about professional topics (shared contracts, shared RFPs, reference checking, FOIA, policies and procedures, joint reverse trade shows, etc.) but then also the fun personal side – shared vendors, sending annoying sales reps to each other, who negotiates our personal purchases, what our kids say when they hear us talk about it at home. We'll reflect on how procurement is like a marriage.

Workday implementations promise efficiency, visibility, and streamlined processes, but the reality after go-live often tells a more complicated story. In this candid and engaging panel session, we’ll explore the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of Workday from a higher education procurement perspective. Panelists will share real-world experiences navigating system limitations, integration challenges, control gaps, and unexpected process friction that emerge once the system is live and fully adopted across campus. More importantly, this session goes beyond identifying problems. We’ll focus on how institutions are actively turning these challenges into solutions, through governance decisions, process redesign, change management, training strategies, and reporting improvements that help restore control and build confidence in the system.