As part of their cost reduction strategies, big businesses worldwide are implementing online purchasing systems.

Some are optimised for print, managing quotes, orders, inventory and much more. According to the Aberdeen research group (as reported in Printing World Jan07), good online ordering systems will typically save print buyers 23% in costs.

Savings are not just the raw print price paid through better management of supplier quotes, but also savings in the clients design, internal purchasing and management overheads. This can be considerable for larger companies juggling many print or stationery products, ordered by hundreds of staff operating out of multiple branches.

A highly customised Digital Storefront, these 'e-procurement' systems help control client print spend, plus semi-automate tendering, management and ordering tasks. And through company templates, they can auto-generate new business cards, direct mail jobs or complete 'versioned' brochures in seconds. Print-ready files, with order, are then transferred in minutes to the pre-designated print provider. No sales or customer service rep needed...

There's a suite of tools included that not only keeps track of everything from the buyer perspective, but also multi-level approval mechanisms to eliminate errors, paperwork, delays, costs and rouge ordering - Most of the 'hidden' costs of print.

Online ordering/procurement systems aren't some distant dream. I witnessed one of the first for print in 1995, not long after the internet started. It was built for CocaCola to auto generate and order business cards. Although it cost US$250k to implement, it eliminated errors and reduced card delivery times from 6 weeks to 1 week. Payback for the system was said to be under a year.

Twelve years on, we're into highly robust third or forth-generation solutions. They're a whole lot better, faster, easier to use and much less expensive. 

Although not every job has these shortcuts, a good proportion do. In some cases, savings of 60% have been recorded - Creatives, marketers, brokers and company owners interested in learning more can email This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it - Find out how much you could be saving each year...

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