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Consulting firm to evaluate Miami University funds

Sarah Sidlow, For The Miami Student

Miami University has hired Accenture, a management consulting firm, to assess the efficiency of many of the university's services.

In 2010, the Strategic Priorities Task Force (SPT) recommended the university hire a consulting firm to help with the project. A committee was created to locate an appropriate firm, which chose Accenture from a pool of qualified candidates.

The project, titled Strategic Assessment of Support Services (SASS), started Jan. 4 and will continue into April, according to the SPT website.

David Creamer, vice president of finance and business services and SASS steering committee co-chair, said the project came about due to the expectation that the university will receive a reduction in the next appropriation from the state budget.

The government expects an $8 billion shortfall over the next two years, Creamer said.

Rebecca Luzadis, SASS co-chair and associate professor, said Miami is no longer significantly raising tuition as it has in previous years. Because of this, Miami has to find other ways to fund university services.

Accenture will conduct interviews and focus groups and collect quantitative data from 18 areas of the university, including regional campus organizations, police services, enrollment services and the library. The firm will focus more extensively on four specific areas, information technology (IT), human resources, finance and accounting and procurement, Luzadis said.

"It gets more and more expensive to manage (things like) IT and human resources, and the university has allocated more (of its) budget towards those things but not really stopped to analyze their effectiveness," Luzadis said. "There may be more cost-effective ways to deliver services in those areas."

Accenture will only be involved in the data gathering and analysis portions of the SASS project, Luzadis said. Once the data has been collected, Accenture and its partner firm, The Hackett Group, will go through a process called benchmarking, which will provide a comparison between Miami's data and data from other universities and organizations.

Consultants from Accenture will then meet with the steering committee to analyze the results, Luzadis said.

"Eventually, Miami will make some decisions," Luzadis said. "We would not have spent the money hiring this firm if we didn't think we would get some good ideas out of this project."

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According to the SPT website, the goal of the project is not to define a new organizational model.

"The goal is to see how we can best accomplish these (needs) in a period where financial resources are likely to be more constrained than they have been in previous years," Creamer said.