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Reporting Vendor Diversity Information

By Helen Freese posted 03-11-2013 11:32 AM

  

I have recently been working with the Kentucky Community and Technical College System (KCTCS) on their Supplier Diversity Initiative. Our overall goal is to ensure that KCTCS meets their 2010-2016 Strategic Plan goals to “reflect the diversity of the students and employees of our 16 colleges and the citizens of the Commonwealth of Kentucky”.

The overall goal was to report to the colleges their overall spend with diverse vendors. The report categories included: African American, Asian, Hispanic, Native American, Other, Woman Owned, Physically Disabled, and Veteran. Our challenge was the fact that the majority of the spend was with the Procurement Card which was not stored in PeopleSoft.  

We had to work with the Procurement Card vendor to obtain the information we needed and develop tables in PeopleSoft to store the information so we could report all of the colleges’ spend instead of just the amounts processed through Accounts Payable. We worked with the Procurement Card vendor to obtain two files, one for all spend for each college by transaction date and one for all spend with diverse vendors for each college by transaction date. This information was then stored in custom tables in PeopleSoft.

Once the Procurement Card spend was in PeopleSoft, it was easy to develop an XML Publisher report, using Connected Query, to report the information on a monthly basis to each college. 

KCTCS Procure Card Example

The report is emailed to the colleges each month automatically so they can monitor their spend. They can see what percentage of their overall spend was with diverse vendors. They can also see which diverse vendors they used and what the vendor’s diversity type is. 

The Systems Office uses this information to make sure the KCTCS initiative and strategic goals are being met.

Working with KCTCS staff on this project – especially David Holcomb, Director of Purchasing, and Wendell Followell, Director of Business Services – has been a great experience.

Interested in learning more?

I will be co-presenting a session at Alliance 2013 with David Holcomb (Purchasing Director at KCTCS) titled “Vendor Diversity Reporting” (Session #31034) on Tuesday, March 19, 4:15 p.m. to 5:15 p.m.

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About Helen Freese

CedarCrestone Senior Finaincials Consultant Helen Freese has more than 15 years of PeopleSoft experience and more than 30 years experience in developing enterprise software, with the majority of her career spent in Higher Education. She has extensive experience in the full lifecycle of application development and concrete knowledge of database concepts. Over the past 10 years, Helen has held lead positions implementing PeopleSoft modules in the financial product line for several higher education and commercial clients. She has worked extensively with eProcurement, Purchasing, Accounts Payable, General Ledger, and Commitment Accounting –through the full lifecycle of the implementation. She has worked with both end users and technical teams on various implementations along with providing support after implementation. Most recently, Helen has been bringing her considerable skills to the CedarCrestone projects at Kentucky Community and Technical College System (KCTCS). She has been working with KCTCS both technically and functionally on the development and support of a custom Budget module, on process improvements for the Procure-to-Pay applications, and on KCTCS’s other PeopleSoft Financial Applications.

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