Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Wins NAEP Award of Excellence in Procurement

SciQuest, Inc. (Nasdaq: SQI), a leading provider of cloud-based business automation solutions for spend management, today announced that its customer, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), has been honored by the National Association of Educational Procurement (NAEP) with an Award of Excellence in Procurement. RPI is now a two-time winner of this annual award, which recognizes procurement departments that support and contribute to the overall mission of a member institution.

In a bold move, RPI moved away from P-Cards in 2010. While this helped the strategic sourcing initiatives, it brought other challenges in procurement and disbursements. Working with SciQuest was key to growing RPI’s supplier marketplace and creating a more digitized, centralized process to procure, manage invoices, and make payments to suppliers. To accomplish this initiative, RPI utilized SciQuest’s Digital Mailroom to serve as a central location for all invoices, eliminating some 40,000 invoices annually, which previously were mailed to and processed by campus departments. With this system, all payments are consolidated and approved, making the entire procure to pay process easier and more secure.

“In addition to the partnership with SciQuest, we also partnered with American Express to utilize its vPayment, or ’virtual card payment,’ within SciQuest’s requisition process, making for a secure and efficient transaction where you might normally need a physical credit card,” said Ron Moraski, Director of Procurement Services at RPI. “By powering these initiatives with SciQuest’s full procure-to-pay suite, we have strengthened our strategic sourcing initiatives and have achieved savings of nearly $6 million in just three years. We are proud to be recognized by the NAEP and look forward to continuing to make strides in higher education procurement.”

Nominations for the NAEP Award for Excellence in Procurement were evaluated based on the scope and complexity of the procurement endeavor, the role of technological leadership throughout, the resulting impact on the institution and the level of demonstrated excellence and professionalism. Award winners represent innovative procurement departments that provide significant advantages to the institution and its faculty, staff and students.

In addition to this award, Paul Martin, Assistant Vice President for Administration at RPI, was also honored with the David H. Lord Cooperative Purchasing Award, which recognizes a NAEP member who has made exceptional contributions to E&I Cooperative Services through volunteerism in the area of cooperative purchasing.

“We are proud to see institutions like RPI honored on a national level for strategic innovation and individual influence in the field of procurement,” said Stephen Wiehe, President and CEO of SciQuest. “Centralizing purchasing is critical for colleges and universities of all sizes to be able to analyze spend across departments, identify suppliers that meet demands and simplify the entire procure-to-pay process, and we are committed to helping new and existing customers in higher education take advantage of the many benefits of eProcurement.”

For more information on the awards, please visit: http://www.naepnet.org/?page=Awards

About SciQuest

SciQuest (Nasdaq: SQI) spend management solutions enable procurement, sourcing and financial professionals to focus on strategic decisions that transform business processes. Our feature-rich products and expert services help hundreds of organizations, including leading global companies, drive bottom line results by improving, automating and optimizing their source-to-settle processes.

Learn more about our solutions and how we can help your organization turn spending into savings at www.sciquest.com.

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