Like printing money: the challenges of print procurement

25 Aug 2009

Source: Supply and Demand Chain Executive, 24 August 2009

Print procurement remains one of the most vexing categories for enterprises to get under control. On the supply side, the size of the potential supply base is enormous, with the trade group Printing Industries of America estimating that more than 36,000 different commercial printing facilities serve the $170 billion U.S. market, each with highly specialized capabilities and limited capacity at any given moment.

On the demand side, the job of reining in print procurement is all the more complex because, as technology research firm IDC writes in its executive brief "Understanding Your Options for Optimized Print Procurement," "Organizational print needs are inherently hybrid, spanning the very strategic, such as sales collateral and product literature, and the non-core, such as employee handbooks and internal company documentation."

As a result of this dynamic, responsibility for print buying is rarely centralized within organizations, according to Jeff Piluso, a principal with consulting firm A.T. Kearney. "We go into many clients and find the print buy scattered across many different parts of the business," says Piluso, who manages large transformation projects in procurement and supply chain for the consultancy's clients. Frequently, Piluso notes, the marketing function drives supplier selection, with Procurement serving in a more transactional role. In fact, research from the Center for Advanced Purchasing Studies (CAPS Research) suggests that fewer than half of companies have formal print procurement programs in place.

The highly specific technical nature of each print buy also makes it a challenge for procurement staff to properly match the organization's requirements for any given job to the most suited supplier, adds Anshu Prasad, a vice president with A.T. Kearney Procurement & Analytical Solution. Print, Prasad says, is a "combinatorially complex" category. "Each provider has its own unique set of capabilities and strengths that they want to play to. All the combinations of what each provider can bring to the table gives you a whole bunch of apples and oranges and pears," he says.

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