The Purchase Order Management System (MPO) offers a stream-lined ordering system for school districts who need to purchase and distribute textbooks to its private and parochial school students attending schools which do not participate in the direct distribution program. Textbook Central's centralized distribution system is well-established, providing textbooks to over 18,000 students attending over 100 non-public schools.

There are however, still some non-public schools (predominantly larger high schools including Chaminade and Kellenberg) in Nassau County that continue to resist participation in the cooperative centralized system–citing the burdens of storage and inventory responsibilities as primary reasons. Most have well-established ordering systems that pass textbook responsibilities on to students and their parents.

For most districts, a significant part of the burden of providing these books is establishing efficient systems for ordering small quantities of individual titles from a large variety of publishers and suppliers. To address this problem, Textbook Central established the Purchase Order Management System (MPO) as an alternate option for all Nassau school districts: we purchase textbooks for a school district’s non-public school students who attend schools that are NOT participating in the loan program.

Here’s how the Purchase Order Management System works:

• The district receives book requests from its students attending its non-participating schools or from the school itself.
• After checking its own inventory, the district develops a consolidated list of books that need to be ordered, and submits the order to us (often these fill-in orders are the most troublesome–long in number of titles and publishers, and low in quantities needed). To maintain the lowest shipping costs, we suggest that districts accumulate the list of their needs, and submit orders to us periodically as needed during the non-public school textbook procurement season.
• Using the sources and contacts we have developed over the past eleven years, Textbook Central will request and evaluate multiple bids for the needed textbooks. Our choice of the specific book supplier is based on both best price and availability.
• We generate and process all purchase orders, and handle invoice reconciliation and settlement of all accounts payable. When needed, we handle the tracking of shipments.
• In most cases, the textbooks are shipped to the school district for distribution, although some non-public schools have allowed direct shipment of a particular district’s books to the school.
• Districts are billed for the textbooks purchased as a separate line item on the bill you are already receiving for your participation in the Textbook Central Centralized Program. Three (3) progressive invoices are produced per textbook ordering season (70%, 20% & final 10%).

The total management of the purchase order, vendor tracking and invoice processing directly assisted 39 of the 53 Nassau districts for 2019-2020. It is likely that our services were utilized to satisfy more than 6,000 additional non-public school students. The fee for this service is 16% of the total textbook procurement cost.

For this fee, we are locating the textbooks for the best available price. Most importantly, however, the Business Office is relieved of the multiple aspects of the ordering process repeated over and over during the textbook procurement season: purchase orders, individual vendor orders, tracking and invoice processing. For many districts, non-public school textbook needs result in hundreds of purchase orders alone for each school year. For each of the past years, the savings we’ve been able to garner through our ordering system has offset our service fee.

In addition to buying textbooks for non-public school students, for several districts we have purchased textbooks for the district’s own needs.