We are pleased to announce that Procurement Services and Enterprise Resource Planning are currently engaged in a project to significantly expand the capabilities of SpearMart, FSU’s online electronic procurement system, hosted by Jaggaer.
Since 2008, FSU has utilized SpearMart (formerly known as E-Market) in a very limited capacity - shopping for products and services from contracted supplier online catalogs. End users have had to navigate between multiple user interfaces (MyFSU Portal, OMNI and SpearMart) to complete procurement transactions.
With the completion of the SpearMart Enhancement Project (anticipated go-live mid Mar 2017), end users will be able to initiate all procurement requisitions from within SpearMart. OMNI will still serve as the financial system of record. However, all requisition and purchase order activity will take place in SpearMart including shopping, requisition creation, workflow approvals, and order distribution. FSU’s receiving and invoicing processes will continue in OMNI as they do today.
So why are we doing this you might ask? The simple answer is that we want to create a more cohesive user experience and deliver greater efficiency to FSU’s procurement processes. The primary goals of the SpearMart Enhancement Project include:
- Creating a “One Stop Shop” for all procurement activity
- Streamlining the Source to Purchase Order process
- Standardizing requisition/form workflow and approvals
- Facilitating paperless transaction processing
- Reducing and simplifying the procurement channels available to campus
- Enhancing process efficiency and increasing responsiveness
- Delivering outstanding customer service
Procurement Services hosted its first project focus group on Oct 11-12th with a cross-section of requesters and approvers from a variety of departments across campus. The feedback on the new system and processes were overwhelmingly positive. Some of the new functionality that received the most praise included:
- The clean relaxing page view/user friendliness of the system
- The ability to
- add attachments to requisitions
- use the comments feature to communicate with requesters/approvers and Procurement Services
- easily split fund purchases
- send automated reminders to approvers
- easily view and approve requisitions from your email and/or via an app on your mobile device
- manage ship to addresses more effectively
- leverage online forms vs. paper based forms
We are planning to implement a number of improvements to the requisition approval process to drive greater efficiency. One of the key changes will be that only purchases made on a hosted or punchout catalog greater than $2,500 will require departmental approval. All non-catalog purchases (aka special requests) regardless of $ amount will require departmental approval. Additional approvals such as Capital, Project, Sponsored Research, etc. will still apply regardless of $ amount.