Is the well finally dry for print savings ?

Finance

If you were the head of finance you could be forgiven for thinking that in an area where significant parts of the cost are raw materials, exactly how long can we keep extracting savings from the well ?

Many of the larger brands have now contracted print management companies over a sustained period, often having changed providers more than once. Yet nobody in finance seems to question how year on year these companies can provide double digit savings ? We’ve now had nearly three decades of standardisation, optimisation, rationalisation, multi-site and multi-client aggregation, yet these savings levels keep getting reported. How ?

Machinery

Without question the UK is home to some of the most innovative and brave suppliers to be found anywhere in the world, investing countless millions in the latest state of the art equipment.

Yes the machines make ready quicker, create less waste and are more accurate, but they still consume paper, board, plastic, ink and toner. The improvements now, whilst meaningful,  tend to be incremental and certainly don’t drive double digit savings from the supply chain.

Why change ?

Whilst as procurement professionals we will protest otherwise the savings quantum remains by far and away the dominant measure of success, and a major factor in performance related personal reward. Not until this structure has been refined will marketing personnel see the procurement function as an anything other than required corporate process.

Is a new model required ?

Undoubtedly, but who has the time or indeed inclination in FMCG businesses to assess this properly, or frankly the requisite ability. Also who’d be brave enough to say we want to increase headcount at a time when many businesses are reducing theirs.

If we accept for a minute that this is now largely about technology, process rigour and expertise, then it is something that procurement can run themselves more cost effectively.