The workload for procurement teams has increased by about 10% in 2025, without added resources. With the greater workload and continuing pressure on procurement teams to reduce costs and deliver savings, the challenge grows.
Traditional sourcing models with time-consuming RFP processes simply can’t keep up and typically default to focusing narrowly on price reductions and minimizing rising costs. This misses broader opportunities to reduce operating expenses and increase strategic value creation.
The E&I Economic Benefit Model™ (EBM) changes the equation and empowers you to work smarter. By combining the measurable power of cooperative contracts with a holistic view of institutional value, E&I Cooperative Services helps you achieve more than savings, producing a sustainable financial impact.
Here’s how the E&I Economic Benefit Model™ outperforms traditional procurement by maximizing cooperative purchasing benefits and improving cost avoidance in procurement across the entire organization.
Traditional Procurement: Where Institutions Lose Value
The traditional procurement cycle is time-consuming. Issue an RFP, publicize it, address questions, collect and organize bid submissions, compare all bids, and award the contract. The process hasn’t evolved much in decades. While this process is effective for specific projects, it also adds costs that erode long-term value:
- Lengthy RFP and contract negotiations that consume staff hours and legal resources
- Decentralized purchasing fragments spend across departments
- Inconsistent compliance tracking and reporting
- Missed rebates and supplier incentive
These inefficiencies waste time, and the administrative costs add up fast. In many cases, procurement teams spend more effort chasing quotes than driving outcomes.
The E&I Economic Benefit Model™ redefines this process by integrating spend data, benchmarking, and cooperative scale into a single framework that measures total value. It’s a key component of every E&I contract and typically delivers cost savings of 4-10% or higher.
Measuring Total Economic Benefit
The E&I Economic Benefit Model™ was designed specifically for education procurement teams to help measure total economic benefit and value when they adopt cooperative contracts across three specific pillars:
- Cost reduction: Achieving lower pricing through competitively solicited, volume-leveraged contracts.
- Cost avoidance: Preventing unnecessary expenses and inefficiencies through smarter sourcing.
- Incentives and revenue: Earning rebates, patronage refunds, and incentive-based returns through participation in cooperative programs.
Together, these pillars form a transparent, repeatable framework that gives you a way to measure results and showcase results to finance teams and other stakeholders.
Cooperative Purchasing Benefits: Scale, Efficiency, and Shared Leverage
One of the most powerful aspects of this model is its foundation in cooperative purchasing. By aggregating the buying power of thousands of member institutions, E&I Cooperative Services delivers access to competitively solicited contracts that save time and increase financial visibility.
The cooperative purchasing benefits include:
- Access to enterprise-scale pricing that you typically cannot achieve on your own
- Eliminating the need for time-consuming RFPs and reducing cycle times
- Built-in compliance mechanisms tailored for the education sector
- Competitively solicited, yet customizable contracts from top-tier suppliers
These produce measurable outcomes. The E&I Economic Benefit Model™ translates cooperative efficiency into financial terms, delivering significant institutional savings.
Cost Avoidance in Procurement: The Hidden Driver of Value
Cost reduction gets the headlines, but the real game-changer in strategic procurement is cost avoidance, the savings that come from preventing expenses before they occur.
Eliminating RFP costs. Reducing administrative overhead. Mitigating supply risk. Stabilizing prices. All of these things add up to improving cost avoidance in procurement, and increasing value. They are measurable savings even when you don’t get an invoice. The E&I Economic Benefit Model™ captures these hidden efficiencies as quantifiable benefits, including avoided costs in your ROI to give you a fuller picture of true value.
How the Economic Benefit Model™ Outperforms Traditional Procurement
Traditional procurement frameworks were built more for transactional control than strategic value. They are often judged on “lowest cost wins,” even when that approach sacrifices service quality, compliance, or long-term savings.
The E&I Economic Benefit Model™ outperforms these legacy approaches in several ways.
| Traditional Procurement | Economic Benefit Model™ |
| Focused on price per transaction | Focused on total institutional value |
| Siloed departmental purchasing | Centralized leverage through cooperative contracts |
| Reactive savings measurement | Proactive cost avoidance and performance tracking |
| Limited reporting visibility | Comprehensive, data-backed transparency |
| Short-term budget wins | Sustainable, long-term financial benefits |
This shift from price-centric to value-centric procurement is meaningful and allows you to focus on additional strategies to improve outcomes, like category management, supplier performance, and strategic initiatives that align with institutional goals.
Smarter Procurement for Sustainable Savings
Limited staff, tighter budgets, funding challenges—the demands are only growing, and so are the expectations for measurable results. To meet those expectations, you need more than competitive quotes. You need a framework that captures overall economic value, and transparency, into the cost drivers in your procurement process.
Learn more about the E&I Economic Benefit Model™ and how you can optimize value across every category of spend.