Btb Guest Author
Bob Hogan
Here are some very practical tactics that any business can use to reduce their business costs in areas that often have low cost visibility but with unnecessarily high costs. Just pick and choose the ones that suit your business best.
1. Mobile Phones: Do your research! Choose a tariff that delivers you best value for your money - driving the cost of other calls and call types down e.g. free internal calls to all company mobiles and landline numbers. Constantly monitor and amend your plan to take full advantage of your actual usage profile/requirement. Ensure your provider does what you want them to do. If not, move to an alternative provider.
2. Desktop Print: Set the default printing function on all your office PCs / Laptop to print black & white and on both sides of the pages. Office paper is one of the single biggest costs and by taking this action you could not only reduce your paper costs by up to 50% but avoid paying for colour copies, often about 10 times the cost of Black & White!
3. Print Material: Switch all your variable print material (business cards, leaflets, compliment slips, etc) to be printed digitally. The quality today is fantastic and turnaround times can be measured in hours! This can lead to reducing printing costs by 60-70%!
4. Mobile Phones: Introduce and implement a "fair use" policy for all staff that have mobile phones - sharing the responsibility for individual bills with a "3 strikes - you lose it" caveat. If your staff know the bills are monitored, spends will be significantly lower than a similar business without the same policy.
5. Energy Costs: Electricity & Gas can be a significant cost for most businesses and this can run to tens of thousands of Euros per annum. There are two ways to drive these costs down, 1. Demand challenge - related to the volume you use. There are many web sites giving you lots of tips and hints in how to reduce energy costs. 2 Supply Challenge - recent competition to the market has allowed a number of very reputable alternative business energy providers to enter the market. We recommend you research these providers and select one suiting your supply profile. Savings here can vary from 5-30%pa!
6. Desktop Print: Install MFDs (Multi Functional Devices) into your offices. This utilizes the benefits of a single high tech device to replace your traditional photocopier, scanner, printer and fax. Not only will you reduce your overall hardware costs by implementing an all inclusive monthly cost structure but you can also reduce your monthly operational costs and avoid additional charges such as toners, service and maintenance.
7. Office Stationery: With this low value / high volume item, appoint a single source of supply. Working with that supplier to set up your own 'essential items' catalogue of pre-selected items at pre-agreed prices. Maintain these benefits by reviewing your monthly suppliers report - taking appropriate action as needed
8. Office Stationery: Ensure your provider "swaps" brand name products for "own brand". You can set up this arrangement in advance with your supplier so that any of the more expensive branded items ordered are automatically 'swapped' and the suppliers own brands are the ones actually delivered - which can often be as low as 25% of the branded items costs and manufactured by the same company.
9. Mobiles: Ban all costly premium services. These can account for a significant amount of a businesses total bills and generally very little if any is business related.
10. Print Material: Rather than paying an external print company to produce your standard business forms (especially the internally used ones), set all these forms up on a shared business drive. Your staff can then print these forms when they are required (and if you're clever, even merge with the required data!). You'll also have the flexibility to make changes at very short notice with no wastage or obsolete material!
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Bob Hogan is managing director of New Wave Purchasing a company that provides purchasing expertise for Irish businesses. Working mainly with SME's to reduce their spends in key cost area such as Telecoms IT, Company Print, Marketing, Desktop Printing, Office Stationery, Energy (Electricity and Gas) and IT Consumables - their focus is on driving unnecessary costs out of your business. Although a new arrival to the Irish Market, New Wave Purchasing has already delivered on average 31% cost savings for our customers.
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