Improving Diverse Spending Efforts Within LSU Athletics
Now that we have officially entered a new fiscal year, the Supplier Diversity Team has been brainstorming additional ways to diversify our spending. But before we jump in head first, we wanted to introduce a more efficient and meaningful way to track diversity spending within each particular department /sport.
Here’s what we’ve learned over the last 6 months:
LSU Athletics made significant efforts and improvements in moving the needle on diverse spending. In fact, we had a number of departments increase from no trackable diversity spend to an increase between 5% - 20%!
Tracking diversity spend can be difficult within our system and we depend on you to help inform the business office when you know a company you are working with may meet the diverse supplier criteria.
Focusing on a total percentage that your department spends can get skewed by factors that are beyond your control.
The Supplier Diversity Team looked at the data and determined alternative solutions that will help continue to increase our expeditures with diverse vendors and simultaneously provide meaningful feedback on your progress!
Looking ahead, the new focus will be on determining a goal for the total number of diverse vendors you use within your department/sport as well as a goal for a spending amount that will benefit the department and our vendors. Additional efforts have been placed on developing ways your department/sport can more easily identify spending categories that can be diversified.
For example, if your sport spends $100 on Nike shoes- it is difficult to use a diverse vendor here since this area is under contractual obligation. However, if we spend $100 on food, printing, health and wellness or any other diverse vendors' spend categories, then we can better calculate a baseline value to allocate to diverse spending. The challenge is now to reach a goal of how many diverse vendors you have utilized. This goal would then drive up your diverse spending.
This new plan of measuring our diverse spend is trackable and will also encourage competition between groups! And afterall, we’ve never met a TIGER that doesn’t want to compete to be the BEST!
