Printing

Within the area of Printing, some products are almost just bound to give you price reductions when you go through our process of Supplier Relationship Management™(SRM™).

The category includes:

• Stationary, envelopes and business cards
• Leaflets like product descriptions and fact sheets
• Periodicals like magazines and newsletters
• Manuals and directions

According to our Category Expert, there is 3 major reasons why prices and services from suppliers can vary much:

1) There has not been established a familiar relationship and co-operation

2) The supplier does not feel to be in a fair competitive situation

3) Client/ supplier do not fit together – ex. The supplier’s machinery do not fully match the client’s needs

Optimization of the Printing budget is not about pushing suppliers into unreasonable low prices, but to plan the whole workflow for all printed units and find the exact supplier or suppliers that can perfectly match the clients needs. If this succeeds, savings can go as high as up to 40 %.

With a busy everyday week, it can be a very good idea to let an external expert take a look on your company’s Printing budget.Very often, internal staff is fully occupied ’having the job done’, for many good reasons. The result is a lack of time to do a thorough analysis of all needs before quoting for offers. Price offers are dealt with on an individual basis for each production or order. As a result of this, fluctuations can be rather important
in the matter of prices, quality and further more much too time demanding internally.

The Acos method to prevent this is our SRM™ process. A thorough analysis of the volume generated over a representative period of time, analysis of the internal workflow, thorough knowledge of all supplies in the market and a very detailed requirement specification – all this gives the suppliers enough information to see that this company is interesting enough to offer the optimal market conditions, also considering the interest for the rest of Acos’ client portfolio.

In most cases, the result ends up in framework agreements with one or several suppliers who
are prepared to meet either some few specific, or all the client’s needs, for the benefit of both client and supplier. The supplier gets an opportunity to plan ahead and optimize special demands from the client, he often gets several orders from the same client who therefore gets improved quality and pronounced savings.
In 2004, Acos achieved an average saving for all Printing clients of 27,59 %.

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