Director’s Message

Creating seamless administrative value through aligning the Procurement, Payment, and Fulfillment functions

Procurement, Disbursements, Material Support Services, Mail Services, Tax, & Travel have historically functioned as separate organizations under the Business & Financial Services (BFS) umbrella. Each served a distinct and necessary function to support teaching and research at UC San Diego. Although the role and deliverables of each group are certainly unique, they support part of a single process aimed at providing goods and services to the university in a timely and cost effective manner. These groups also support a common base of campus clients, who I suspect never actually viewed the purchase, payment, and delivery functions separately; their realistic expectation was that once goods were ordered through the designated process, that they would be paid for and delivered in a seamless manner.

I’m excited that the organizational alignment of BFS has placed Disbursements, Mail Services, Material Support Services, Procurement & Contracts, Tax, and Travel under a single leadership structure. Aligning these administrative units and associated processes is consistent with what is considered to be a best practice in both the public and private sectors.

We have been identifying systems and processes that can be improved by working together and will slowly evolve the organizations so that we are presenting a coordinated approach. Improved communication and knowledge sharing between the procurement, payment, and fulfillment divisions allow us to fully utilize and to provide broader exposure to important functions and services that are not directly related to the procure to pay to fulfill cycle, such as Tax, Travel, Surplus Sales, Small Business, Sustainability, and Moving Services. Each of these groups has the potential to provide significant internal value in addition to supporting the broader campus.

We appreciate your support as we continue to evolve this concept and look forward to demonstrating tangible value through our alignment of the procure to pay to fulfill process.

Associate Controller, Integrated Supply Chain
Chief Procurement Officer