Your workday may feel like a 1,000-piece puzzle; imagine adding a timer to that puzzle. You’re under more pressure and may not give each piece the attention it needs because you don’t have the time. Procurement teams know what it’s like to frequently work down to the wire with tight deadlines and budgets. However, Mesa Arts Center’s Director of Production, Robby Elliott, saw an opportunity to avoid the stress of a short time frame to complete a large project through a cooperative purchasing strategy.
Elliott handles all things production for the Mesa Arts Center’s roughly 900 performances a year. He and his team unload all equipment, set up the show, make sure the performance runs smoothly and then load everything back onto the trucks. All of these responsibilities on top of needing to identify solutions for a major renovation made Elliott realize he needed to find a way to streamline and fast track the process. He was able to expedite much of the time-consuming steps by leveraging a cooperative purchasing organization.
Mesa Arts Center is Arizona's largest arts center and home to four theaters, five art galleries and 14 art studios. At the start of 2020, the arts center set out to refurbish the seating and flooring of two of their theaters, one with 1,600 seats and the other 550. In March 2020, the project was shut down due to the COVID-19 outbreak. Once the project ramped up again in February of 2021, Elliott and his team aimed to finish by their reopening date of October 1, 2021, leaving them only 9 months to do the planning, bid, order, and installation. Although they had already decided to tackle this renovation quickly, cooperative purchasing is what made the faster pace possible.
