The Edron Academy is a leading school in Mexico City, known for its high academic standards, broad curriculum and unique core values. With over 1,000 students aged 2-18 years, the school follows the English National Curriculum alongside key parts of the Mexican National Curriculum, offering iGCSE courses and the IB Diploma.
The school was founded in 1963 by Edward Foulkes and Ronald Stech, who shared a unique vision: to foster a learning community in which every child is safe, happy, and successful. Today, the Edron Academy carries on that proud tradition as the first COBIS Accredited Member school, the first High-Performance Learning World Class School, and the first and only school to offer the Duke of Edinburgh’s International Award in Mexico.
The challenges
While the Edron Academy prides itself on being a forward-thinking, progressive school, its procurement process was not measuring up to that gold standard. Over time, the school had grown into an important organization with more than 260 staff members, spread out over 90 different cost centers. A largely manual process had worked serviceably for a time, but it simply did not scale for an organization that was now issuing 150-200 POs a month – the school was beginning to experience significant bottlenecks and unnecessary financial costs.
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Manual, error-prone process: The entire procurement process was paper-based and labor-intensive. Tracking of shipments had to be done manually, leading to frequent delays and loss of inventory.
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Lack of budget visibility: Annual budget plans used to be a cumbersome, prolonged process at Edron. Individual departments had little idea of how much they had spent the previous year, making it challenging to forecast future expenses. In day-to-day operations, there was a lack of visibility into expenditures and the remaining budget.
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Lack of spend policy and control: With no way to restrict purchase and approval privileges to the appropriate parties, the school experienced poor adherence to procurement policies.
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Ineffective, disjointed vendor management: Every teacher was choosing their own suppliers, with no rigorous evaluation of cost and quality, resulting in money left on the table.
The solution
While user-friendliness and fit are always important considerations, they were particularly crucial for Edron, due to the decentralized nature of their procurement process. All 260 staff members would have to quickly learn and adopt the new system. Hence, it was critical for the system to have as low a learning curve as possible, or people simply would not use it.
In this regard, Procurify over-delivered. The roll-out and training process was seamless, and broad adoption was achieved in a very short time. “We just had one training session, and most teachers were using it properly within two weeks,” proudly recounts Karla de la Torre, IT Manager at Edron. “When new systems truly help in everyday work, adoption is easier. New teachers have been able to pick it up on their own even more quickly, just from reading our training materials.”
Since implementing Procurify, the Edron Academy has seen a broad range of improvements across its entire procurement process.
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Rapid implementation: Even with a variety of different approval routing processes and cost centers to implement, the Edron Academy was able to get Procurify up and running in just 15 days – just in time for the start of the new school year.
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Cost reductions: Department heads can now monitor their budget in real time on a simple visual dashboard, ensuring they do not over or under-spend. Since signing up for Procurify, the school estimates that they’ve saved 2% in overall procurement costs.
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Streamlined fiscal planning: With more visibility into year-over-year spend, departments have reliable data to plan the year ahead. Departments that do not submit their plans in time are unable to approve purchases, creating a strong incentive to meet the annual planning deadline.
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Superior sourcing transparency: Procurify’s vendor catalog allows Edron to store detailed information about all their vendors and track all past purchases made. This data has allowed Edron to determine true end-to-end costs for various items and select the best vendors.
Takeaways
For the Edron Academy, Procurify has been nothing short of a game-changer. Summing up the team’s feelings on their new reality, Karla enthused, “I love Procurify, it’s one of our best products. I can’t tell you how much it’s changed our lives.”
A better procurement process positively impacts administration and by extension, the standards of the service provided by the school. The cost savings, superior sourcing, and streamlined fiscal planning brought about by Procurify empower the Edron Academy to focus less on their spending and more on what matters most: the future of their students.
