By streamlining the ways in which it buys goods and controls its inventory, Syracuse University will reduce its environmental impact — and will save over $130,000 while doing so.

Custodial and maintenance supplies will no longer be delivered to several distribution points around campus, said Ray Kowalski, a facilities zone manager at SU, in an email. Instead, the supplies will be “strategically focused, making the process efficient and reducing delivery vehicles on campus,” he said.

Kowalski said the university has also partnered with Grainger Industrial Supply, an industrial equipment and maintenance tools supplier. The partnership, which comes as a branch of the Operational Excellence division of Chancellor Kent Syverud’s Fast Forward initiative, means SU will use just one preferred supplier — Grainger — for a majority of its custodial and maintenance supplies. This allows the university to cut spending and make inventory more efficient, Kowalski said.

Replacing the more than 1,000 paper towel dispensers on campus with electric hand dryers is also part of the effort, which, based on an Operational Excellence analysis, will save SU a projected $130,000 annually, he said.

The majority of custodial and maintenance service purchases will be made through SU’s existing procurement system, an electronic marketplace for the buying and selling of supplies, Kowalski said. In the past, he added, only part of SU’s purchases were made through the system.

“By adopting a total inventory solutions approach, we’ll be able to enhance Physical Plant and FixIt service, improve delivery times and reduce waste on campus,” said Pete Sala, vice president and chief campus facilities officer, in an SU News release. “Grainger’s best-in-class strategies will help us consolidate our supply list, improve ordering processes to keep our facilities up and running and enhance our ability to manage costs.”

As operations costs continued to rise, Operational Excellence initiative teams reconsidered how the university buys goods and services, keeping in mind a labor-and-cost-saving approach, Kowalski said.

“We benchmarked against other similar institutions and discovered how Syracuse could improve efficiencies and manage our costs on frequently purchased items,” he said.

Kowalski added that SU continues to renegotiate the pricing on many of the supplies it purchases and could see further savings as a result.

Published on February 2, 2016 at 8:55 pm

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