 Hi, and welcome to today's Wednesday webinar. I'm Jill Bates, and with me is Stephanie Wannick, and we are meeting with Craig Peterson, who is with Nebraska Cooperative Purchasing, and we are really excited for Craig to share some information about co-op purchase and tell you about all the resources that are available. So we're going to turn it over to Craig. Thank you, and I think the easiest way to start with co-op is to go to the website www.neesucoop.org, and that's the landing page I have listed here. There are probably two or three areas that I would point out, and they're both under member procurement. So if you go to member procurement and marketplace resources, you'd like to learn a little bit more about the marketplace resources. We have a broken down video of the marketplace of registering on the marketplace, approval chains explained, and approving and releasing orders. So it just kind of gives you a quick synopsis of the marketplace in short videos. So it's a nice resource to have. Also, if you want to point your teachers to ordering from the marketplace, this is a good one to watch, basic marketplace ordering. It gives you a quick 20 minutes. It is a little lengthier, but it gives you 20 minutes of explanation of the marketplace. We also have some other recorded vendor information, so securely demonstration. We have a contract with Securely. We've recorded those short webinars, and the new seller is a 49 minute webinar that we had. So we'll also add one here this next week for Myon through Renaissance. So we'll have that available here shortly. So that's the resources. If you want to find out information about what contracts are available without logging into the marketplace, you can go browse product categories. And by doing that, we have it broken down into multiple different categories. And when you click into a category, it will give you those vendors that are in that category. So I clicked into Atlantic Floor's Running Tracks, Synthetic Tourism, and Tennis Course. We have a number of vendors that are listed there. Most of these vendors on this category are from a national contract. I would say all of them are, actually. And so you can kind of click into each vendor and read a little bit about them. We'll have more information available in the marketplace, and so we'll get you in there here shortly. So Craig, teachers can do this all year long, right? Not just in March or April? Yes. I mean, the co-op has changed over the years. It used to be kind of an annual by-process, that one time a year. Now we have catalogs available year-round to include the annual by catalog. With some of the vendors, we extend pricing up to January, and we'll be taking that catalog down here soon, but it is available from last year. The difference is there may be increased pricing on the extended catalog of the annual by because we're not doing aggregated ordering, we're doing teacher orders or staff orders at that point, so there may be a difference in price then your best price is going to be during that annual by period. So member procurement, there is also a page dedicated to the annual by-process. It lists breakdown of the timeline, so the first one is going to be the annual by. It also gives staff vendor contact information, so if there's a problem with the shipment, they can come in here and pull up the vendor name and then look who the contact is, and it's important to do that rather than sometimes contacting the customer service representatives, because sometimes those customer service representatives are not aware of the annual by-process. Staff can access the W-9s for the business department. If there's a discrepancy, we have a form here that you can file that discrepancy with the vendor, and then we provide updates for the annual by, so if a product gets substituted or something, you can come in here. This is just a Google Doc. Come in here, access the spreadsheet, and do a search on that item to see if it's been changed. We have to approve any changes after they've been awarded, so if you get a product that has changed, you can review that here. And then there's a link here to suggest new items, and so for the next year, we take those suggestions and we write specifications and add that to our catalog, so that's where you can come in and add those. Then we also have the pay-per-buy listed in the timelines available for that, so that is most of the information available on our website. Obviously, if you need to contact us, select the contact us. My office is in Holdrich, and so that's my contact information, but we have an office in Ainsworth also, and then our executive director is actually in Lovista. So to get into the marketplace, we have this button in the middle of the page. It doesn't matter where you're at on our website. If you choose that button, it'll take you to the login page. If you don't have an account, you can register. Basically, what you do is you choose your agency name, so if I say Wahoo Public Schools or something, I can select that agency. It pops up, and then I just populate all the information. As long as you utilize an email address of the school district, and we have that address in our white list, you'll automatically be accepted into the system. You'll be able to turn around and log in once you've set all this up. If not, if we don't have that in the white list, then I get a notification of it, and I'll go in and verify that that is the school's domain, and then we'll add it. So once we get into the marketplace, and I'm going to hop out here, I'm already logged in, this is what you're going to see. You're going to see vendor tiles. Within the marketplace, we have vendors listed up here at the top, what we call marketplace suppliers. They are vendors that have shoppable items that you can order today, and right now we have 30, 35 vendors available that you can shop from, not to include vendors within our ESUCC store. There's multiple vendors in there too. But then there's additional suppliers down below, and these suppliers would require you to contact them direct. We don't have the items in the marketplace to shop from. You're not going to order AstroTurf from or the marketplace anyway. So you need to contact those vendors and ask for ESUCC or AEPA pricing. AEPA is our national organization, and so we bring a number of contracts back from that national organization to include AstroTurf, FieldTurf, a number of vendors that are in that category. So that is available. And so there's a 25 additional vendors that do not have shoppable items and so forth. So the way I would utilize the marketplace, I will point out that if you want to find out more information about that vendor, if you click on the vendor logo, it's going to take you to an overview of that vendor, and very quickly you can read up on the vendor what's available. It'll give you corporate contact information, but we also highlight Nebraska contact, your Nebraska sales contact in the lower right-hand corner. And so I was just reaching out to that vendor if you have any questions. We list documents within that vendor's information to include oftentimes the contract, maybe a flyer, maybe even a W-9 sometimes if we have that, and so it's available there. But you also will have a link to shop for that supplier's site if they have a store that you can shop in. So by clicking on that link or by clicking on the icon underneath the globe, it'll take me to that vendor where that vendor's information is stored in the shopping store. Think of it as a mall and you can enter all these different stores. This particular vendor info based was in the ESUCC store, which is going to have multiple vendors. And if I hit search here, it's going to list those vendors on the left-hand side over here. Myon, IXL, InfoBase, NoB4, Worldbook, Harris School Solutions, JourneyEd, and securely they're all listed within the ESUCC store. So if I wanted to look at that info based vendor, I could checkmark that and I can see what that vendor has offered. By clicking into InfoBase, I can go in and look a little bit deeper and get more information on each product and what the cost is and so forth. So this is price per student. So you'd add the number of students in your school district. So another one that's very recent. I'll go back to our main marketplace page. So the link up in the upper left-hand corner will take me back to the main page and highlight another vendor that is very recently. All these are in alphabetic order. So sometimes you have to do some looking to see what the vendors are available. Mucella is a new contract that we have available. And again, here's a flyer. If I click on that flyer, I can get more information about this vendor. And so there's a two-page flyer. This one's probably two pages. And so you can get information about that. I can shop on that supplier site. So when I hit shop on supplier site, it takes me to that store, which is only Mucella. And so if I hit search, it's going to list all the items in their store. They have 43 items. So I can peruse this and paginate through the pages. There's page numbers down below. And that'll take me to through each page that they have available on the marketplace. And that might be the case that some of our teachers are used to using. We've suggested it in the past to use the free version, but now there's the upgraded pro license, too. So that's a good one. Right. So that's kind of a reading engagement for students, teachers, and principals. Order it through the marketplace. That webinar under the resource page is available for Mucella. Another one that I will highlight is Kajeet. Kajeet is very new. And we just contracted with this vendor. What it does is it allows us to put mobile hotspots on buses or check out hotspots to students to take home for internet access at home. And so this is the overview of Kajeet. Within that overview, there is a request form. So if I select that request form, it takes me out to another website. I populate, get a price quote. I populate everything here. The state I'm coming from and the AESA contract vehicle, if you select ESUCC Nebraska, that will signify that it's you're one of our members. So they'll give you the reduced pricing at that point. So that's how you access Kajeet. I would think that Kajeet would be a vendor that would be really important for schools to know about, especially in this day and age where people need to have Wi-Fi access all the time. It's great for activity buses. You know, those long trips, you know, they're able to continue doing their homework then. If you're utilizing a learning management system or something like that. So or if you've got a population of students, low-income students, you can provide internet access at home for them and make it equitable to those students then. So yes. Another one I'll highlight is a fairly recent one too, is Scholastic. We just brought them on board. And this one I have to do some additional work to bring it, make it available in the marketplace so it may not be available quite yet. But a number of things that Scholastic offers is literacy skills, guided reading, early childhood, classroom libraries, digital resources. They have supplemental programs, not to mention their family and community engagement programs, learning supports and professional learning. So they have a broad spectrum of product that they can offer and so forth. Again, these are going to be listed in the marketplace. I have access to them right now, but they're not quite available. I haven't got the word from the representative to turn this on for everybody. And so at that point we'll have over 5,000 or right at 5,000 items available through Scholastic. So I think elementary teacher loves Scholastic. That's good to hear to my ears then. So I did mention the annual buy. It is still available. So what that means is it's not going to get aggregated by address like we typically do for the annual buy as soon as a teacher or staff member submits their order. That order then goes to those vendors. If I go into that store and look at those items, we had 3,900 and some items available at the annual buy process. We still have 3,633 items available today. And those would be available up until January 1. So when they will begin the process of awarding and building the catalog, making that available February 1 for the new year. So we're already working on that in the big closes this Friday. One of the questions that we're always asked about the annual buy is that when you're in the catalog and you see that little snapshot of the item, can you click on the link to find out more specific information about the item? Sure, yeah. Some of these items do. So yes, I can come in here for this camera and click on this camera. And within this I get more information. But a lot of times what we'll do is also list a specification URL. And so I can click on that and go out to the manufacturer's website. And if we find those, we'll add those URLs. We don't have them for every item though. Some vendors will submit them and some others will not. So here's the specification for that camera that we just saw. And I can actually go to that specifications page and read more, get the full breadth of information there is about that camera. The more technical items we'll do that with, the less technical ones we may not have those. So yeah, those are available. I will also point out we have kind of another annual buy process for a number of items. That would include World Book, Movie Licensing USA, which you're not going to see right now, Movie Licensing listed, because it is only available from February 15th to May 15th. And then Securely is in the Internet filtering solution. So we have a number of products where ESUCC is the billed entity. And then we bill with school districts based on the orders that they placed. So World Book is still in the marketplace. They've allowed us to keep it up. But we like to aggregate that between February 15th and then May 15th. So you can place your orders and then after May 15th we'll send the PO to World Book. And again, click on the globe. For World Book, it takes you out to a store. And this one actually is the ESUCC store again. And I can come down here, check mark World Book. And I can see the number of items listed there. Now we have the digital items in our marketplace. We also have print material available through World Book under contract. It would be just a matter of communicating with the Nebraska representative, which we have a new one now. But that information is in the marketplace. So if I go back and look at World Book, click on their icon. Leslie Christensen is the new World Book representative in Nebraska. Dale Weber has retired. So that's available. Some other key bids that I will talk about. We go out to bid on a number of other items to include food. And so if I come down here, Cisco is our food vendor. Schools, if you've not worked with us, we did deeper discounts going through Cisco. You have to have a signed contract with ESUCC. Those contracts renew August 1st of every year. And so Cisco is the name vendor on that. We also have a custodial buy. And that custodial vendor is Supply Works. They're a home depot company. In order to see Supply Works, I have to punch out to them by clicking on the globe and it takes me to their website. I will mention there is a way to search across the marketplace. So if I have a manufacturer number, and I'm just going to say hard drive, but if I had a manufacturer number, I could click in here and do a search and it'll search across multiple catalogs in the marketplace. And so when I hit that search icon, and it's the magnifying glass, it'll go out and search a number of items. It also says that we may have hard drive, I'm not sure why, in the paper catalog. But so I could punch out to that and look for it and I'm not going to find it. But I can see that I've got a number of vendors here, Traxel, CDWG, and a lot of CDWG journey add. And so it went out and searched across multiple catalogs. Now the caveat to that is when I go back to the marketplace, marketplace homepage, it is only going to search those vendors that have the magnifying glass. And so if they do not have the magnifying glass like Supply Works, it's not going to search their page. So I have to punch out to their website in order to search Supply Works. And so what that means is I'm out on their site now and I'm shopping from their site, but when I check out it's going to bring the shopping cart back into the main marketplace page to finalize it and send it through an approval chain dependent upon your district and how your district is set up. So that's one caveat by doing a search up above. It's not going to search all vendors. So Supply Works was our custodial vendor. We also have a lighting vendor. We went out to bid for lighting in Ballas and Boss Lighting out of Lincoln is that lighting vendor. And they do have that search connector, so you can search across it. But their items are available in a store that they manage. And so when we punch out to that store this is what we're going to see. You can do the search up here for LED maybe. And it should bring back some results and that one didn't. So that maybe not change a little bit. I could click on the LED lamps I guess and narrow my selection down for that but these items have been bid out and are available. So their site looks like they've changed a little bit up there. It's just a little slow. And there's the items. So if I want to T8 LED light I can purchase those here. So add that to my cart. When I check out it transfers it back into the main marketplace and we finalize it there. And then the last one I'll talk about is AEPA vendors. We have 29 nationally awarded vendors that we bring back to the state of Nebraska. And those 29 vendors are spread out throughout the marketplace. A way to see if it's a national vendor is click on the vendor logo. And if the cooperative name says AEPA that means they're they're a national vendor. They've come from our nationally awarded cooperative. We contract with them locally in Nebraska. So we bring those back to you here. Some of those include a technology catalog with CDWG and M&J technology. A roofing vendor Trimco. We have two roofing vendors but the Trimco is probably the best one for Nebraska schools. School specially has a number of categories that they participate in but they have a unique project that they call projects by design where they'll come in with a school district that has a building project and help you design the classroom furnishings. Typically your architects are going to do that but by using projects by design through school specially you oftentimes will save a school district 30 to 40 thousand dollars architectural fees and just doing that because school specially doesn't charge you anything. Obviously they are looking for the furnishings on the back end of that and so they're going to design it to where it meets their vendor offering I guess. But they also have some lockdown solutions for your classrooms for safety to include door handles retrofit door handles that you can lock from the inside rather than having to use a key from the outside for those safety issues. And that's really a broad overview of Co-op I guess. The main thing that we utilize the marketplace page for is offering a vendor information. There's a lot more information available to include some annual buy dates listed here in the marketplace. We offer a Twitter feed if you like to read our tweets or not you can close that if you don't like to but it's available. I can come in here very quickly and say who are the by categories who are the furniture vendors and by clicking on that I can narrow down those vendors that offer furnishings or furniture. And so the category listing is very helpful within the marketplace to narrow vendors down sometimes. And I always have to go back to home to get back to my home page though so that's a good overview I would say. Do you have questions? I don't have any specific questions right now but I really learned a lot just by sitting here and listening to you show how to use the website. And I think it shows that there's a little bit of something for everyone. I had no idea that we could order food through Co-op purchasing and you know the janitorial supplies and you know really it could touch every staff member. And we do about 17 million dollars in sales on average every year and so throughout the state. The thing I like to say about Co-op through ESUCC is that when you shop with us you're keeping the dollars within the state to serve students within the state. If you sort of shop with another cooperative and there's tons of national cooperatives out there you're sending dollars out of the state. So I'd like to keep our dollars within the state. Well thanks so much for helping us out and showing everyone the resources available. And anybody can reach out to us. Easy address to reach out to us is co-op at ESUCC.org and that'll hit multiple staff members so we'll see that message. That way if one of us is out in the office but that's probably the easiest way to reach us. Okay well thanks again Craig and we've enjoyed the time that we spent with you and from Steph and me join us at next week's Wednesday webinar also.