Inside the Work: What's Been Keeping Us Busy This Month

Jan-Feb has always been busy, and this year was no different. We’ve been working closely with two long-standing boarding school clients, helping them navigate operational costs and uncover new cost-saving opportunities. In their words, every $ they save helps keep their fees down.

While this work doesn’t necessarily follow the traditional ERA Group process, the core focus remains: driving efficiencies and improving financial outcomes. Historically, this work has revolved around food and catering in their boarding sections, but in the last couple of years, both have sought to expand their focus to include other areas, such as canteens, uniforms, and office supplies. As a result, much of January was spent closing out 2024 and laying the groundwork for 2025.

Key Areas We Delivered in January

Meal Cost Tracking: One school was pleased to see a less than 2% increase in their cost per meal in 2024, a pleasing result given current market conditions. It was about reviewing their 2024 spend, looking for additional opportunities to optimise it, and benchmarking their meal costs.

Canteen Performance Review: We demonstrated a 40% difference in spending per student between schools, highlighting opportunities for improved cost control and/or increased opportunities.

Sales & Pricing Adjustments: We reviewed canteen pricing and sales trends to ensure alignment with their 2025 budget plans while identifying opportunities for savings (and yes, there were some).

Food Category Tender Process: Achieved a 9% savings on a previously uncontracted category, adding to the  21% savings recently secured on another food category.

Copy Paper Usage Analysis: One of the school’s more significant single-item expenses. By benchmarking against student numbers, we found that paper consumption per student has remained steady at ~1.25 reams per student per year, meaning the increased spending we saw in 2024 was due to enrolment growth—not price hikes as assumed (prices had decreased). Given the shift toward digital learning and the use of computers, we had expected paper use to fall, but the data seems to suggest otherwise.

Uniform Trends: While one of the schools was generally happy with the performance of its uniform shop, it wanted a deeper analysis of purchasing patterns. One finding demonstrated that students now purchase 1.5 shirts per year on average, up from 1 per year just four years ago, and the total number of items purchased per student has increased by 50% since pre-COVID. We also demonstrated that the leading supplier increased prices by ~ 5% last year.

We do this exercise quarterly so the schools know how they are tracking against budget. Any deviations are explained, and corrective action is taken if necessary. Simple and small insights like these are helping these schools refine their inventory management, optimise their costs and improve their budgeting.

The Growing Demand for Benchmarking

Benchmarking is becoming an increasingly important tool for internal analysis and peer comparisons for schools and businesses. Over the past seven years of working with these schools, benchmarking evolved from “we don’t have the data” into a critical decision-making tool.

An example of how one school uses analysis is the case of paper use. Once we established that paper use went against expectations, the school could quickly identify where the issue lies and take some corrective steps.

These schools are asking:

“How are we performing? Where can we improve? And where are we already doing well?”

Using student numbers has allowed us to analyse spending trends across key categories to gain deeper insights. Some of our data now dates back to 2017, pre-COVID, and offers a valuable longer-term perspective.

The appetite for peer benchmarking and deeper data analysis is growing as schools recognise the financial stakes. And as both schools constantly remind me, there’s a fair bit at stake.

If you are interested in benchmarking or cost management at your school or organisation, I would love to chat and see what’s possible.

I am happy to present to boards or senior management if it helps them understand the opportunity. This is too important to ignore or gloss over.