University of Sussex achieves end-to-end spend management with Proactis and Unit4

Challenge

When Ian McKee joined the University of Sussex over a decade ago as Deputy Director of Finance, procurement was seen across the institution as the ‘spend police’ – a function associated with saying no, rather than one that added strategic value. Manual, paper-heavy processes dominated sourcing, contracting and invoicing, with limited data available to support decision-making.

At the same time, the wider higher education sector was contending with tuition fee reform, rising student expectations, and mounting pressure on operational efficiency. The University needed to shift both the perception and the reality of its procurement and finance function – moving from a reactive, paper-based operation towards one that could demonstrate measurable value, evidence-based control, and genuine strategic input, without a single disruptive, big-bang transformation programme.

Solution

Rather than pursue one large-scale transformation, Ian McKee and his team took a deliberately sequential, multi-year approach. Building on an initial Marketplace deployment, the University progressively rolled out Proactis Invoice Capture, Supplier Relationship Management, Sourcing and Contract Management, alongside Unit4’s own Purchase-to-Pay module – each phase building on the credibility and data gained from the last.

The cumulative effect has been the digitisation of the University’s entire Source-to-Pay function. A spend dashboard now enables evidence-based decisions on spending patterns, timing, and policy, while the legal team and other stakeholders across the University have self-service, real-time access to contract documentation. KPIs are tracked at scale across the entire contract portfolio, giving full visibility of bottlenecks and creditor reporting.

As incoming post no longer needs to be opened and sorted manually, the resources previously allocated to that task have been freed for higher-value work – reinforcing the University’s wider sustainability strategy, of which its paperless operations are now a key pillar. A forthcoming major migration of Unit4 to the cloud marks the next stage of the partnership, extending modernisation from process automation into the next generation operating model.