Significant Cost Savings Realized When Expenses Given Corporate View

Latest news from American Print Management

01/23/2009

Not too long ago, International Construction Equipment (ICE) considered print to be an incidental expense -- what it spent on business cards, stationery, copying and the print produced for it by several local printers in Matthews, North Carolina, just outside of Charlotte.  

"Somehow we had a mental block and did not consider print to include our marketing collateral, direct mail, CD replication, training and parts manuals, instruction sheets, labels, packaging, safety materials, and even marketing give-away trinkets," said P. A. Cunningham, marketing and communications manager at ICE.  "All of this is spread across the company in departmental budgets.  What seemed inconsequential to us, until we took time to actually look at it from a corporate view, is really quite substantial."  

ICE evaluated its print costs after it connected with American Print Management, a print management firm that guarantees 25 percent procured print cost savings when its methodology is used.  

"We would have been foolish not to take advantage of that guarantee, "Cunningham said.  "Some of us were skeptical.  What we learned was truly unbelievable.  First, American Print Management does not charge for deploying its print management system.  It charges only for measured reduction in the cost of our procured print.  There was just no risk to us."   

Using its U.S. patented methodology for competitive procurement, combined with a sophisticated workflow and communication system and with the guidance of experts who know the print industry, American Print Management is able to produce predictable savings for its clients. Here is how it works.

The first requirement is for the buyer to create a preferred supplier database -- one that includes suppliers that the buyer wants to do business with based on established working relationships. ICE found that having the right suppliers is essential.

Using this database, preferred supplier attributes are electronically compared to job specifications for which the buyer seeks pricing.  By automatically matching supplier attributes and job specifications, the database identifies a subset of suppliers qualified to perform the particular job.  The specifications, in a solicitation format, are then sent to suppliers in the subset, allowing those suppliers to submit price quotes based on their own production capacities.  Each supplier is permitted to bid high, low or not at all without setting a precedent for pricing by the supplier for the next job and without affecting the database’s ability to choose the supplier each and every time that its attributes match a job’s specifications.  The buyer can then award the job to the low bidder, because the buyer has confidence that the low bid price is real as it has come from a supplier that the buyer initially qualified. 

This competitive and patented methodology works to drive prices down by an average of 42 percent.

"To our utter amazement our print costs dropped like one of our pile drivers," Cunningham said.  "Our savings comparing apples to apples are, in fact, the average 42 percent that American Print Management claims.  That represents a lot of money when you consider a total print spend the size of ours.  Enough cost savings to positively impact our bottom line! "    

According to Cunningham, “American Print Management charges us a small agreed upon percentage of the savings and not a penny more.  We keep the lion’s share of the savings!”   

Buyers, like ICE, benefit by maintaining a database of suppliers sufficiently robust, so that at any point in time, a number of the suppliers feel compelled to win work at greatly reduced prices in order to fill their own unused production capacity.  For these suppliers, work produced when production schedules are open can be priced for a lot less than work produced during times when operations are at full capacity. 

Cunningham said “We found that getting professional print related advice has been key to our success.  Before American Print Management entered the scene, we relied on print suppliers to write our specs and tell us what they could do and when they could do it.  It is now apparent to us that we paid a premium just for print suppliers to sell us their own services.  Now, we get a full package of services without having to pay one penny more.  American Print Management satisfies our needs for print expertise, spec writing, budget pricing, supplier identification and qualification, procurement and process assistance, job tracking and coordination, a superb workflow and communication system – in fact everything we need to get the job done right. 

"We admit to not being experts in print procurement.  After all we specialize in the pile driving and drilled shaft/bored pile equipment business.  With American Print Management, we are getting the kind of print procurement assistance we have desperately needed for a long, long time, "Cunningham said.  "Our print suppliers are happier.  Our print quality has made a marked improvement.  Our print is actually arriving when it is supposed to arrive.  And all this improvement in quality and service is costing us 60% of what we paid before."

About International Construction Equipment, Inc.
In 1974, International Construction Equipment, Inc. established manufacturing and market advanced equipment for the deep foundation industry. The company is now North America 's largest manufacturer of pile driving and drilling equipment. ICE equipment is manufactured in the USA and China and is marketed through ICE's international organization of company-owned branches and independent distributors. For more information, please visit www.iceusa.com.