University Procurement Services News & Updates
February 2020
|
|
RU Marketplace Restrictions During Oracle System Update
As part of routine operations, Oracle will be conducting system-wide technical updates from
8:00 p.m. Friday, February 21, 2020 through Sunday, February 23, 2020
. During this time, Oracle will be inaccessible and RU Marketplace requisitions will be available for
view only.
Since Marketplace requires funds checking through Oracle, if use
rs attempt to submit or approve a new requisition during this time, an error message will appear.
A communication from the Office of the University Controller will follow announcing when the system is operational on Monday, February 24, 2020.
|
|
Procurement Services Pioneers in Launching Robotic Processing Automation Bots
On January 30, University Procurement Services (UPS) successfully deployed two Robotic Processing Automation (RPA) bots to perform price compliance validation and RU Marketplace user profile maintenance. RPA utilizes software bots, also known as digital workers, to improve the accuracy, consistency, scalability, and quality of manual core processes. This technology has been gaining traction in the industry, and is being adopted as part of core business processes.
Associate Vice President of Procurement and Chief Procurement Officer Nimish Patel introduced the idea of implementing the relatively new technology to higher education. “Many large corporations have adopted RPA, but it has not been embraced as quickly in higher education. In fact, Rutgers is the second university in the Big Ten to leverage this technology,” said Patel.
Natalie Mayfield, Shalini Jeena, Sujata Kumari, and Rachel Liu implemented this technology by completing many hours of self-learning and participating in three days of instructor-led training, along with prototyping. The team comprised of individuals from different areas of University Procurement Services, so the technology has the potential to have high scalability. Office of Information Technology provided their support for the development and production infrastructure.
This milestone was achieved after four months of hard work, learning, infrastructure building, security reviews, documenting, coding, and testing. However, the RPA journey has just begun. The team has qualified a pipeline of processes in multiple sprints for automation, and is partnering with Rutgers Business School for a plan to give students an opportunity to learn and gain experience in Robotic Process Automation.
|
|
Representatives from Office Depot, Ricoh, University Procurement Services, and Audit and Advisory Services will be available to answer your questions.
|
Stop by as your schedule permits
|
|
RBHS/Newark Campus
Dental School
Room B 723
110 Bergen Street, Newark NJ 07103
|
|
|
 |
Ink & Toner Recycling Program
|
As the University strives to become more sustainable and efficient in our everyday operations, we have partnered with our contracted supplier Ricoh to offer the Consumables Take-Back Program.
|
|
|
|
Creating A Paperless Procurement Process
|
In March of 2019, we implemented Bonfire, an eSourcing Platform used to conduct university sourcing events such as RFP, RFI, and RFQs. As a result of using this tool, we have created a paperless sourcing process. We are pleased to share that so far this Fiscal Year, we have saved approximately 27,000 pages of paper.
|
|
|
|
University Procurement Services had the opportunity to host two students through the Douglass Residential College externship program. Both students were juniors in the Rutgers Business School.
We are increasing our engagement with the student community, and looking to further partner with the Business School, the Office of Career Exploration and Success, and others. We are also engaging with our suppliers to do the same through our Supplier Relationship Management program.
|
|
University Procurement Services
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
