How Cooperative Purchasing Can Simplify the Buying Process and Increase Your Purchasing Power

When you’re searching for the best furniture for your facilities, it’s easy to get overwhelmed with comprehensively reviewing and vetting all the different furniture partners you want to consider. However, it’s important that suppliers are going to be able to meet all of your project’s needs––from the overall budget to the details of the contract––so ensuring that your furniture partner can meet these needs is a critical part of the buying process.

To streamline the furniture buying process, many institutions choose to partner with a purchasing cooperative. Through a purchasing cooperative, it’s simple to find a quality furniture partner with competitive pricing, while also minimizing the time and energy your purchasing decision-makers need to acquire necessary furniture and complete a project.

What is Cooperative Purchasing

Cooperative purchasing is an arrangement in which multiple businesses combine their buying requirements onto a single contract and aggregate volume to increase their purchasing power. Institutions can partner with purchasing cooperatives to access a selection of vendors that have ready-to-use competitive contracts.

Using a purchasing cooperative to find a furniture partner cuts down the timeline and effort required to select and acquire furniture for your facilities, eliminating the necessity to draft and advertise an RFP, repeatedly answer questions from vendors, and review the details of each proposal to ensure they meet all needs and requirements.

Instead, buying through a cooperative just involves deciding what your schools need, requesting vendor quotes, and getting necessary approvals to place an order. Vendors must meet best practice requirements to join a cooperative: the cooperative handles the RFP process up front and selects vendors to partner with based on a predetermined set of standards.

The Benefits of Cooperative Purchasing

Purchasing cooperatives offer many benefits to partner institutions when it comes to saving time and money. By combining the buying requirements of network institutions, purchasing cooperatives help organizations purchase quality products with competitive pricing. This pricing is further discounted based on quantity, helping institutions increase their purchasing power.

Plus, cooperative purchasing greatly simplifies the buying process, shaving down hours of time spent searching, making RFPs, and reviewing proposals. Institutions that are part of a purchasing cooperative can rely on clear contracts with vetted vendors that offer competitive pricing––all in significantly less time than handling the process individually.

Purchasing cooperatives are a valuable tool that can help schools streamline their furniture buying process, typically while saving money and finding higher quality products.