Office

This category covers office supplies, a cost category where most organisations in average spend Dkk. 3.000 – 3.500 per staff member per year. The category includes:

 

• Copy paper

• Small stationary

• Toner cartridges

• IT consumer goods

• Tea/coffee

• Various cleaning articles 

 

Reducing costs is also earning money. With Acos’ Supplier Relationship Management^TM process SRM^TM), most organisations can reduce costs and improve quality without spending too much

time, and costs saved is money earned.

Usually purchase and reordering is placed with current suppliers and very often based on outdated price agreements. Also, it can be difficult to be sure whether one have a good or poor agreement even though your organisation just recently re-negotiated the terms or compared prices to others.

 

For example; some suppliers can offer you very interesting prices on few chosen loss leaders – prices which are often below cost price. At the same time, prices on other products can be way over the market price, which means that the supplier still earns his money back – and more.

The  SRM^TM method is based on the registry of the last 12 months invoices, a historical analysis on a line by line basis. When the real consumer pattern is known, the Acos Category Expert makes the tender based on the volume of 1 year of purchase, including all requirement specifications for benchmarking the offers received. Incoming price offers are compared directly to the benchmark of each product line and the client makes his choice based on the bottom line result of Acos’ comparisons.

In most cases, the client ends up with one primary supplier, who can offer best prices based on presuming having this client for at least 16 months and probably more. Very often this process also leads to more effective order procedures.
In advance, the client often get additional advantages, e.g. internet solution, with the advantage having a personalized catalogue at his disposal with previous agreed prices. This also helps the client reducing the time spent in ordering = reducing general costs.

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PRINTING

Within the area of Printing, some products are almost just bound to give you price reductions when you go through our process of [link=/page/products/srm-areas/printing/] Supplier Relationship Management[TM](SRM[TM]).[/link]
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 resulting is a lack of time to do an 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 12 months period, 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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FREIGHT

 

The category includes:

 

• All forms of transportation and distribution
• Transport intermediary
• Outsourcing (stock, materiel etc.)Service and quality requirements
• Infrastructure
• CompetitorsEnvironment
• Courier transport
• National Transportation
• Packaging

Auditing,benchmarking, tender, implementation and post audit is all Acos’ line of approach and we call this [link=/page/products/srm-areas/printing/] Supplier Relationship Management^TM (SRM^TM).[/link]. Auditing Freight takes several weeks to do with advanced tools of analysis. An extensive database of around 150 Freight solutions from Danish and foreign companies form the basis of Acos’ proposal of solutions.[/p][p]Starting from the Freight business, important experiences and contacts have been gathered about and to the commercial Freight market, combined with great knowledge about client needs and demand for professional experience within this market.[/p][p]It is very important to know the market in depth when you have to tailor-make a Freight agreement. You have to know in which geographical areas specific suppliers operate and when their trucks are empty in order to get reasonable agreements for both client and supplier.In a very busy department of shipping and logistics, staff often don’t have the time to gather the information from a whole year of operation about transports, intervals, charges and freight rates.

 

Co-operating with Acos will give you:

 

1) A complete profile of your Freight usage

2) The assistance of the Category Expert in choosing suppliers for the tender, the Category Expert who knows the situation of each supplier

The result is often a 2-digit savings in % on the Freight costs and often a reduction in number of suppliers, which gives a much quicker and effective communication. The ’Acos Post Audit’ also ensures on-going revision of all made agreements and extra costs become visible and can be cleared right away. The Post Audit also ensures optimal implementation of supplier agreements, stop to extra charges which seems to find their way back on the invoices, resulting in considerable credit notes.

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INTERNAL SERVICES

 

Internal Services include:

 

• Cleaning agreements

• Window cleaning

• Canteen

• Flower and plants

• Mat service

• Facility management

• Quality of service and advice

• Cleaning articles

• Work clothes

• Security equipment

• Computer and telephone cleaning

• Towel service

 

Most organisations focus more on the quantity than the quality of the cleaning. By using the Acos requirement specifications, organisations can improve their cleaning by up to 10-30 %. Cleaning is a superficial and intangible service. In many cases, suppliers make their own requirement specifications and this often leads to disagreements about the needs and efforts done.

 

Many organisations spend too much money on cleaning and cleaning articles due to a lack of knowledge of the market prices and the proper suppliers.
Every organisation, big or small, would benefit from specified cleaning requirements. And there is no demand for how big the cleaning budget should be. Acos’ point of reference is the existing agreement. Then we take daily requirements into account and what kind of cleaning is needed.

 

The most common problem is that clients make requirements in regard to how often the cleaning is done, instead of asking for a [bold]specific cleaning level[/bold]. It’s all about having an optimal cleaning done – not how often the vacuum cleaning should be done.

Hardly ever all rooms in company buildings need the same level of cleaning – e.g the reception needs far more cleaning than the small meeting room down the hall.
Acos’ experience shows the advantage in having a system of requirement specifications and reduces cleaning costs, improving quality rather than quantity.

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TELECOM

The business of Telecom is characterized by buzz-words and lack of transparency on each service, such as mobile prices, internal free calls, international calls etc. You can only optimize your Telecom agreement if you exactly know your consumer profile.
Liberalization of the Telecom market means that you can often get extensive improvements or price reductions just by giving your current supplier a thorough going-over. However many organisations are having a hard time getting these advantages because they don’t know their actual consumption well enough.
Typically, suppliers will lower their prices on specific services, e.g. international calls, and then they just get it all back on expensive mobile minutes.[/p][p]Acos often experiences clients who have changed their whole system to another telco, ending up with a far more expensive solution than before.

Traffic profile means savings in Telecom.
Before starting negotiations with telco companies, it is necessary to know the entire profile of traffic within fixed lines, mobile lines and data communication. On the same time, you have to analyze the exact need of capacity and new functionality, e.g. possibilities for integration of fixed lines, mobile lines and IP telecom.

The Acos method analyzes thoroughly the real, historical consumption and matches this with an estimation of future needs. This traffic profile is described in a very detailed requirement specification, and with this, selected suppliers can now be part of a future tender. This method gives us an opportunity to analyze and compare all incoming offers, showing exactly where money can be saved and help clients in getting more efficient deals.

Our experience shows that organisations can save in average between 12-25 % and in addition even get much better functionality.

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PACKAGING

This category includes all kinds of packaging, no matter whether the usage is for sending, promotional packages or storage.

With Acos’ Supplier Relationship Management^TM (SRM^TM) method, most organisations can achieve savings and quality improvements with a minimal time usage.

Usually purchase and reordering is placed with current suppliers and very often based on outdated price agreements.Also, it can be difficult to be sure whether you have a good or poor agreement even though your organisation just recently re-negotiated the terms or compared prices to others.

For example; some suppliers can offer you very interesting prices on few chosen loss leaders – prices which are often below cost price. At the same time, prices on other products can be way over the market price, which means that the supplier still earns his money back – and more.
The  SRM^TM method is based on the registry of the last 12 months invoices, a historical analysis on a line by line basis. When the real consumer pattern is known, the Acos Category Expert makes the tender based on the volume of 1 year of purchase, including all requirement specifications for benchmarking the offers received. Incoming price offers are compared directly to the benchmark of each product line and the client makes his choice based on the bottom line result of Acos’ comparisons.

In most cases, the client ends up with one primary supplier, who can offer best prices based on presuming having this client for at least 16 months and probably more. Very often this process also leads to more effective order procedures.