Purchasing Power

Hollie Chancey is coordinator, physical plant stores at the University of South Florida in Tampa, the second largest university in the southeast. She started working at the university 12 years ago, starting out in the mailroom, earning her degree from the university, and working her way up through the system. She oversees a four-person department and is responsible for purchasing all materials and supplies for building repair, the custodial staff, the grounds crew, and for vehicle repair.

Jay Schneider: One of your biggest responsibilities is the physical plant store. Can you talk about that?

Hollie Chancey: The store was created because of an audit criticism. It was necessary to have a better handle on items coming in and out of the store—although at the time it wasn’t really the store. They wanted to have a warehouse that purchased products for the physical plant, but not have a markup on items.

I previously worked in the inventory department for the university so I had a lot of experience working with auditors and knowing more or less what they were looking for and making sure we had a good audit trail. We are a government entity and we have to make sure we do everything to get the most from the taxpayer’s dollar. When a work order is issued, we show the charge has gone to a specific building, and at the end of the year, in order to qualify for grant money and things like that, our finance people conduct a large cost study to see how much money it took to maintain certain buildings on campus.

JS: When are the majority of the school’s purchases made?

HC: They’re made on a daily basis. We average, on a slow day, five purchase orders while on a busy day we can issue up to 20 purchase orders.

JS: The University of South Florida is among the top 20 largest in the nation. How does the school’s size affect your job?

HC: You have to remember that the university itself has region campuses. We have campuses in Sarasota, Manatee, and Lakeland. Each of those campuses has their own physical plant and is responsible for maintenance of their buildings.

The Tampa campus, where I work, is the largest and we keep growing. We have roughly 350 buildings. We found that through a lot of training and by working with the custodial staff and the grounds staff, what helps us is a program we created that tracks spending trends and shows what materials come in and go out quickly, which we use as an indicator of what to put in the store. For something to meet our criteria, it has to come through our store at least once a week. If it comes any less frequently, we categorize it as an as-needed item. We don’t have a large warehouse to house everything that we would possibly need to maintain a campus like this.

We also have a very good relationship with a lot of local vendors where they more or less know what we need and if we can’t house it in our warehouse they can house it for us. When we call about a purchase order, depending on how fast we can get a purchase order initiated and to the vendor, nine times out of 10 the material is here within hours or the next day.

JS: How do you know what to store? What is it you find you have to keep on hand?

HC: We keep a lot of towels, tissues, and custodial chemicals. Those are very consistent items. On the maintenance side, there is a lot of HVAC items, such as chemicals, lamps, light bulbs, ballasts, and things like that. We stock minimal tools because each maintenance supervisor has a list that he gives to his maintenance employees and they’re supposed to have the tools they need. We understand they sometimes lose them and we do replace them when that happens. As far as plumbing, we keep a lot of plumbing supplies. That’s probably the most common maintenance issue on campus. Between that and lighting, those are our top two biggest categories.

We do a spending trends report at the end of the year and I break items down into categories of what we purchase and I break that down by building so I can tell if a building improved in lighting or got worse in plumbing, or whatever the situation is. We have a lot of mechanisms in place where we can track things.

JS: When you generate reports showing something has gotten worse within a building, do you pass those reports on to the university showing what buildings need upgrading or remodeling?

HC: Yes, but that would come from the directors; my boss would make that type of decision. We have a preventative maintenance plan where if a problem is noted, that building is put on a facilities enhancement list where it becomes a project and money is put into restoring it or certain functions within the building.

JS: Overall, how would you rate the condition of the campus and its buildings?

HC: If it was a building we’ve been able to do general maintenance on for 30 years, the building is in excellent shape. The university owns some buildings that they leased out to people who never did any maintenance and when we got them back, they were in horrible shape. It took millions of dollars to put them back into decent shape. The ones we’ve had all along are in great shape. I shutter when we have to take buildings back. I don’t know how the other people don’t take maintenance into consideration.

JS: Is a tight budget always a problem for you?

HC: Last year we spent just under $1 million alone on materials that came through the store. And that was before we started purchasing for grounds and vehicle repair, so this year I expect the amount to be higher.

JS: On what do you dedicate the majority of your budget?

HC: I’m kind of a unique fish for physical plant. Budget-wise, I have a very minimal budget. My budget is mainly for operating, but I have been given the authority where, if I need a maintenance item, I can go into the maintenance supervisor’s budget and pull money out of it. If I need a grounds item, I go into the ground’s budget and pull money out of there. I’m basically authorized to purchase items using their budgets.

JS: Of what accomplishments are you most proud?

HC: The thing I’m probably most proud of is our database. The first database we had didn’t keep any history, so as soon as you do one transaction and then another, information on the previous one is gone forever. It was a nightmare trying to use it. My proudest accomplishment is designing the new database. I didn’t write the programming but I did design it and I worked with the university’s talented computer people to make it work the way I wanted. There are still some things I’d like to tweak, but it’s 95 percent to 98 percent where I want it. It works extremely well. It’s one of the reasons our responsibility increased to include grounds and the vehicle repair shop.

JS: What has been your biggest challenge?

HC: Probably when we first started the store. At the time I only purchased for two departments: maintenance and custodial. Custodial wasn’t much of a problem, but maintenance was a huge problem because of the way things were done. When we opened the store we eliminated some perks so there was some resistance. Over the years they finally adapted when they realized the store wasn’t going away and we weren’t budging. We have a nickname, we call this “Hollie World.”

JS: Are you noticing any trends within the scope of your job?

HC: About five years ago, the energy management department conducted a green lights project that wound up saving the university millions of dollars in energy conservation.

The department went through basically every building and re-lamped them. Basically re-lamping the entire campus. As a result, we have a lot of compact fluorescents and a lot of dimming ballasts. I’ve seen an evolution of products and noticed that’s hot. Our database used to have something like 80 different ballasts that I’d have to purchase on a regular basis, but when they re-lamped, they tried to standardize what they put in. I still have different quantities, but it’s nowhere near what it used to be.

JS: How do you know what brands to purchase? Are you approached by suppliers? Do you go to tradeshows?

HC: It’s kind of a combination. I am on a list of tradeshows when they come to the area and I make an effort to go. If I can’t go I’ll send one of my staff.

We also have vendors that come to the campus so we’re made aware of some of the new things out there. We have some vendors who come to us weekly, we have our regulars who let us know about new products and they’re always willing to do research for us. We’ve done our best to have very good relationships with our vendors.

JS: What items would you like to see go away?

HC: Too long a list. Items that I probably never want to deal with again are light fixtures. When the university did the green lights project, we were given some leftover fixtures, but the problem is the new fixtures never go bad. We have these fixtures that we can’t move because the fixtures aren’t going bad. They’re just here. That’s probably my one nightmare—I can’t figure out what to do with them. They’re old enough where we can’t have the vendor take them back and get credit for them, yet we have them in contingency in case one of these new fixtures, which were just installed one to five years ago, ever goes bad. That doesn’t happen all that often.

JS: How could you imagine your job made easier? In a perfect world, what changes would you like to make or see made?

HC: The biggest thing is making sure the vendors are paid on time. We have to rely on other departments to do that. In a perfect world I’d like a little more power over those departments so I can make sure my vendors are paid. For example, I have a situation right now where one of my vendors put me on credit hold because some other department didn’t pay a bill and I’m stuck because I need a product from them but can’t get it until this invoice gets paid.