It truly is a wonder when it comes to how much companies spend on simple daily supplies. I never imagined that our office would spend a thousand dollars a month on simple things like paper, packages, and labels. My work decided to trim down this year and well that meant losing a few people along with cutting budgets. I am happy enough to have a job so when I was given the task of cutting costs in the daily office supplies to took the job seriously. I figured this task would not only reflect upon my skills but my ability to stay employed as well. So I decided to work on increasing my knowledge of this area and how to save our company money as well.
My goal was to cut costs and to do this I knew that I need to know what we were using and how often. That was the start of understanding how to purchase in the long run for this office task. Our previous manager did not keep great records and that turned out to be a pretty big problem. I had to take a whole month and track every item used and when and why. This was a big waste, but I knew it would pay off in the end. So with many tracking sheets and lots of tedious work I figured out a schedule.
From this point on I knew when we used printing paper and for what projects. I knew how many cardboard boxes we shipped each month and how many labels we used for packages and cardboard boxes. This small step gave me a true budget number to go on and now it was up to me to find a way to cut it. A lot of people try to get complicated and cut processes or change the way things or projects are done. This is hard, time-consuming, and usually annoying to all involved. Instead, I simply wanted to cut the cost of all these products down to the lowest possible amount. From here I knew that I had to start shopping. I don't really like shopping but this would be the fastest way to lower prices and keep my managers happy.
I began by searching on Amazon. I knew that this was the place for a convenient and easy supply. I knew the exact amount of items I would need to get through an entire month so I put it all up in my cart to see what I could do. This is what I am pretty sure my predecessor did as well. But what this really did was give me a bottom-line price for easy shipping.
Then I ended up searching in two more locations. I wanted to look locally and see if I could find a good deal that was close to Amazon or even better, but I knew that would most likely not work. So I called in some orders and sent my list to see what companies could do. Then I went online and shopped the largest shipping supply companies and gave them my orders. They sent quotes and I sent the competators quotes against each other. It tunrs out I was able to lower the costs from Amazon by 30%. This was all by not changing anything in the processes, but simply the way we purchased. It was an awesome way to save money and I suggest you give this method a try.
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