How We Connect Our Clients with the Best Printing Solutions

Want to get the best price on commercial printing services without sacrificing quality? So do most companies. But they often lack the leverage they need to earn premium pricing with their printing sources.

When you engage RBO PrintLogistix for printing solutions, you get the benefit of our expanded buying power and broad, deep sourcing base.

Several years ago, we at RBO PrintLogistix wanted to maximize the buying power we could offer our clients. So we sat down and took a look at which print partners we were using and how we could strengthen relationships to our clients’ advantage. 

A Thorough Vendor Assessment Pays Dividends

We wanted to be sure we were offering clients the very best option for each type of print job. So we categorized the print products we buy most, which include letterhead, brochures, forms, labels, and practically any form of business print you can think of. Within each category, we identified the best print partner for each product and the quantity they excel at.

This process illustrated to us that no one print partner can handle every print job. Some print partners will provide quotes for particular jobs that their production equipment can’t even produce. They’ll then send these jobs out to other print manufacturers for completion. Our Print Procurement Process guards against this practice, because it will probably involve markups and delays that the client hadn’t accounted for. 

Armed with this centralized view of all of our vendors, we then made some changes that continue to benefit our clients.

How Competition Among Commercial Printing Services Benefits You

There are several ways in which this sourcing assessment exercise benefits our clients.

For one thing, it enables us to notify all our print partners that they will be in direct competition with each other for our clients’ business, and to ask them for bids on commonly requested items. For example, we had a project that required us to solicit bids for printing invoices. Most sources came in at around the same price, but one particular source (which we had used for years), came in at more than twice the price. When we told them about the discrepancy, they asked us for a chance to re-do their bid.

We declined. We informed them that we now expect all our sources to offer their very best price on the first try.

Compiling a sourcing list also enabled us to direct more business to sources that our clients typically can’t access on their own. There are certain commercial printing services that don’t employ a sales or marketing staff of their own because they want to minimize overhead costs. These businesses rely solely on companies like ours for their business. With our account executives utilizing our intelligent sourcing database, we gain scale of purchasing power and can offer the lowest prices far more often.

Our intelligent sourcing database also lets our account executives see all of the potential printing solutions to a client’s challenge. We give them the information they need to connect a client with the most appropriate source who will do the best overall job of meeting their needs. While price is almost always a concern, clients are often just as concerned about a vendor’s location, ability to meet a deadline, print quality, consistency, and reputation.

When we’re helping our clients make the best overall decisions about commercial printing services, we’re doing our job. To further serve our clients, we can develop a Web to Print online storefront to help refine ordering processes and provide marketers greater brand control. I’ll be back soon to share more about how we ensure we’re only connecting you with the very best sources for your specific needs.