For most organisations complex indirect spend categories pose an opportunity for significant savings and efficiencies but are often seen as too challenging to address. Professional Services, Travel and Expense; Print and Marketing Procurement can represent substantial spends but require specialist expertise and technology platforms to achieve savings and efficiencies.
However, with cost pressure on most organisations, complex categories need to be considered a higher priority – especially as savings of 17-40% can be achieved.
Claritum have created a White Paper which focuses on one of the largest of these complex categories and is intended to demystify the approach to achieve savings and efficiencies. This is the first of a series of White Papers from Claritum addressing Print and Marketing Services Procurement.
Print and marketing services are surprisingly large spends for most organisations. Dependent on sector, this category can represent between 0.5% and 3% of revenues. According to research, expenditure on printed materials in the US totals US$167billion per annum and Euro243billion in Europe.
Yet much of this spend falls outside the visibility and control of a formal procurement program. According to Aberdeen, 80% of print is manually sourced using phone, fax and email; leading to higher than necessary costs, inefficiencies and errors.
Why? Print is typically difficult to capture and control as requirements are dispersed across the organisation and usually bought by whoever has the need. Marketing may have established long term relationships with suppliers or rely on their agencies to purchase print on their behalf – often at inflated margins. Most businesses and departments use printed materials and responsibility for buying it is often delegated to junior staff with little or no experience or understanding of what they are ordering.
Print can be a complex area of spend where minor variances in specification, date of order, production process or supplier selection having significant impacts on cost.
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