Intelligent Print Sourcing: Your Ticket to Smart Printing Solutions

I wrote recently about the vendor assessment process we use to identify the best print partners for our printing solution clients. Here’s more about how we assess the quality of each vendor we use through a process we call Intelligent Print Sourcing.

When we solicit commercial printing companies from our staff to be added to our approved vendor list, we know that some of the names we get back are not familiar to our clients. To ease the client’s natural fear of the unknown, we created a vendor assessment survey for our account executives and customer service reps to rate their recommended vendors according to nine criteria such as price, quality, service, consistency, and turnaround.

 The results of this assessment give our account executives a valuable resource for determining the overall quality of a commercial printing company. Now, when an account executive wants to recommend an unfamiliar vendor to a client based on price or other factors, he or she can easily review the vendor’s criteria ratings and confirm from our experience that the client won’t be exposed to risk. 

In other words, we can do more than offer clients the best price—we can offer the best overall printing solution. 

Casting a Broad Net for Commercial Printing Companies

Of course, we rely on more than just our team’s recommendations as we continue to look for the best vendors in each print category. We also reach out through a trade organization called Print Services and Distribution Association (PSDA). The PSDA gives us many opportunities to meet and evaluate potential new partners for our clients.

By attending PSDA events, we can meet new sources face-to-face and begin to get an idea of what they can offer our clients. After careful vetting, we continually integrate these partners into our vendor base to broaden and improve the range of services we can provide.

As our national print partner base has grown over the years, we’ve gained the ability to offer our clients not only the most competitive pricing, but also printers here in St. Louis who have the capability of handling all aspects of a job right under their roof. Keeping printing solutions local and avoiding the need to involve multiple vendors greatly increases the chances that a job will be completed on time.

We also stay on top of shipping. Rather than letting vendors decide how printed pieces will be shipped, we negotiate for our clients and find the best rates for services that will meet our clients’ timelines.

From $2,200 Down to $475?

What’s the benefit of an Intelligent Print Sourcing process in which we consider a broad and deep network of commercial printing companies to execute our printing solutions?

I could tell you lots of success stories. Like the time we had a client that used a special mix of brown in its collateral—a brown that wasn’t even represented by a PMS color. We weren’t sure the color could be matched on a digital press, but we let one of our partners have a shot at it. This vendor amazed us by not only finding an exact match, but also printing on a money-saving 30% post-consumer paper and providing three-day turnaround times. 

And then there was the time we negotiated shipping for a client and reduced their expenses per shipment from $2,200 to $475.

This is what intelligent sourcing and providing quality printing solutions means to us, and what it can mean for your business. If you’re interested in saving money and maximizing quality on all your print projects, drop us a line.