Purchasing at Penn

Summary

LSP’s with Requisitioner access can place orders through BEN’s and Penn Marketplace. Faculty and Staff should work with their LSP Support team when making technology purchases like computers, printers, monitors, docks, and more! This way they can ensure that the devices purchased will work well with our security and patch management system requirements.

The average life cycle of computer hardware at Penn is 4 years. At that time we will advise retiring the machine and ordering a newer model. Once the old machine is retired and returned to DCS, it may enter the Surplus inventory.

Keep Faculty and Staff informed of the machines’ life cycle and this process
Make sure the Asset in Fresh Service is completely filled out, including Purchase and End-of-Life dates

How are things purchased?

Everything should start with a ticket to the LSP Support team.
LSP’s with Requisitioner access can create quotes based on Penn Marketplace carts. Sometimes a simple screenshot will do the trick.
After they receive approval to place the order, the LSP’s can submit the carts to the designated person in their business office for final approval.

Where can we purchase things?

The Penn Marketplace is where you can find all the Penn Approved Vendors. A majority of the vendors LSP’s interact with have Punch-out Sites. These are webpages that look very similar to regular consumer-facing store pages but have the added benefit of forwarding their finalized cart into Penn Marketplace and then ultimately BEN’s
BEN’s is the portal we use to attach budget codes and submit orders to the business office for approval. This is where we can submit Non-Marketplace Purchase Orders as well.

Amazon is a recently approved vendor with a caveat. Some products fall under a category that other catalog suppliers in the Penn Marketplace carry and you may want to consider them before placing your order through Amazon Business.
While searching for items on Amazon’s Punchout you may see an "Organization restricted" icon or label. This restriction doesn't prevent you from continuing to process your order with Amazon Business.
If you see “Organization Blocked” it indicates a hard blocking of that product category and prevents us from adding these products to our cart. The add-to-cart option will appear greyed out for any product categories that are blocked

Best practices for creating a quote and questions to ask the user

Do they want a new machine in addition to what they are already using, or is this replacing a machine that no longer does what they want it to?
Penn policy
Allocations - when should we reach out to Allocations to inquire about the next refresh?

Building the purchase order (cart)

If replacing a current machine, what did they like or dislike about it
What accessories and/or peripherals do they currently use, and what will they need to connect the new purchase to their existing setup?
How will this new hardware/software integrate with their current system (Understand user’s ecosystem)