Today, most educational purchasing departments are perceived more as tactical order-processing units than strategic, innovative partners. Universities have multiple priorities across a diverse set of stakeholders, including students, faculty and staff.  The purchasing department is best leveraged as a strategic partner that helps advance those goals without compromising stakeholder priorities.
 
AArete helps bring about that change by serving as a catalyst for your sourcing function. AArete provides analytical horsepower, supply-market intelligence and competitive benchmarks that drive significant cost savings with incumbent suppliers. We work collaboratively with our clients to strengthen the impact of the sourcing team and make those savings sustainable.

A self-insured university simultaneously performs multiple functions in the pharmacy marketplace: as an insurance payer for staff, an on-campus retailer for students and a provider in academic medical centers or other facilities. Because each piece requires a different approach, the best and most comprehensive pharmacy program requires deep pharmacy expertise which AArete offers.
 
Our reputable healthcare expertise, paired with our Pharmacy Center of Excellence helps reduce insurance costs, improve retail operations and significantly lower medical pharmacy spend, without compromising health outcomes and member experience.

Too often, universities try to save money by redesigning their health insurance and benefit plans, resulting in diminished benefits and resentment among affected faculty and staff. AArete offers proven strategies to lower both the financial burden and administrative expenses through cost mechanisms, utilization and strategic programs — without impacting the plan and current benefits employees enjoy. Today, many institutions struggle to identify practical cost-reduction opportunities because they lack the depth of experienced resources to capably assess large volumes of claims data.
 
AArete uses advanced analytical horsepower to translate claims data into actionable insights, helping you understand costs and consider better alternatives. AArete’s clients have reduced their costs of plan administration without changing services through implementing place-of-service optimization strategies that steer employees to the most appropriate setting. In addition, AArete helps exercise your control over member eligibility and the provider networks best suited for the member population. With the right data and the proper interpretation from AArete, we enable our clients to make decisions that increase the satisfaction of its members while also lowering costs.

When a procurement function is underperforming, the first step is to understand which aspect is missing the mark and to what extent. AArete’s Procurement Assessment is a rigorous and fact-based approach that’s customizable to any situation. It addresses 120 unique areas of inquiry, examining four fundamental components of strategy, organization, processes and technology, and assessing the five activities critical to successful procurement: 

Strategic sourcing
Supplier enablement
Buying
Order settlement
Supply market analysis

AArete’s assessment evaluates the impact across six cost/benefit areas: savings, time, risk, customer satisfaction, supplier relationships and team member satisfaction.
 
The result of this comprehensive evaluation is a scorecard showing a detailed assessment of the gaps and opportunities within an organization and the steps needed to improve it. Armed with this knowledge, we help our clients decide (where to improve and how quickly the organization can get there. Upon this transformation, AArete allocates an expert team to assist in developing a project plan by engaging with stakeholders to elevate appropriate concerns and navigating inevitable obstacles, all while staying laser-focused on delivering measurable results.

So much of a university’s success is tied to student retention: reputational rankings, revenues and of course, the fundamental mission of the university to change the course of the lives of its students. Data can help in extraordinary ways. AArete transforms student data into actionable insights, helping institutions understand how to intervene when students are retention risks. 
 
We combine our expertise in data analytics with a collaborative approach to help  refine and interpret student population data. Our team of data scientists uses this data to build a customized model, ensuring that you enroll the right students and sustain them for the duration of their prescribed course of study. Data can identify: 

The students in the “sweet spot” (those who would succeed at your school and want to attend)
How to market to them pre- and post-enrollment
New programs that can increase enrollment and revenue

Ongoing cost pressures and a trend towards adopting business best practices are forcing educational institutions to examine non-academic labor costs. One problem is that the federated model unintentionally creates redundancies and inefficiencies. This is evidenced in multiple IT departments making fragmented decisions or an insourced workforce structure for a variety of low-cost positions (e.g. custodians, landscapers, waiters and cooks).
 
We combine our knowledge of education, experience across multiple industries and expertise in analytics to help squeeze the most out of  data and uncover innovative solutions to accomplish varied and essential administrative goals.