Meeting Economic Realities --Morgan
• Expanding a new in-house print shop that paid for itself in less than a year, including employees, overhead and equipment.
• Making simple changes to its internal shipping procedures that met shipping expectations, while creating tremendous savings.
• Saving 40 percent on large-volume print projects by choosing a more effective supplier.
By moving a majority of its business to a national vendor, the company leveraged better buying power and lower paper costs, and relocated its fulfillment and digital print to a facility in Chicago. The Chicago move allowed The Advisory Board to not only save on postage, but on turnaround time, too.
In 2009, print buyers will be following The Advisory Board’s lead and taking a long, hard look at their finances to see how they will be able to cut print costs, without cutting print quantity or quality.
They are getting everyone on board. Meta Brophy believes it is essential to lay out all of the pieces of the puzzle before getting started. She advises companies to get all of the players together at the initial stage of a project in order to maximize logistics. And, as the director of publishing operations at Consumer Reports in Yonkers, NY, Brophy has experience. She recently shared with Print Buyers Online.com how her organization ensures that everyone is on the same page:
“My department, along with our marketing colleagues, gets together with our merge/purge house, printers, lettershops, commingling and logistics partners at a seasonal kickoff meeting, at which we map out direct mail and newspaper insert campaigns. Sometimes, we work backwards from a drop date and, sometimes, we work from the beginning to set the schedule to see how we will maximize logistics. For instance, since it can be more environmentally efficient to ship things by rail than by truck, do we have the time?”
