Reed Business Information Saves on Printing
Category: Sheet-fed printing
Savings: £115,000
Reed Business Information (RBI) is one of the world’s leading business-to-business publishers, best known for magazines including The New Scientist, Computer Weekly and Flight International. Other highly regarded industry titles with smaller circulations, known as the ‘sheet-fed’ portfolio because of the way they are printed, include the Hairdressers Journal, Health and Beauty Salon and Optician. 
Procurement managers decided that the printing of its sheet-fed portfolio of 15 magazines, which had been undertaken by the same two companies for several years at a cost of almost £1 million a year, should be put out to tender. They wanted to offer the work to a wider range of suppliers and make sure they were paying the best market price. The procurement team also wanted to explore whether there was a better way to supply the paper for the magazines. Traditionally it had been bought by RBI and sent to the printers, but they wanted to know if it would be more economic for the printers to buy it themselves.
They decided to see whether running an eAuction could help in managing the project. They called in TradingPartners, whose auction managers examined RBI’s requirements in detail and set about scanning the market for suitable suppliers.
The Process
A detailed Request for Information exercise checked everything from geographical location to environmental policy. TradingPartners shortlisted 50 potential printing firms, of which 24 were deemed capable of undertaking the work and were sent the Invitation to Tender.
Marianne Bushell, Group Print and Paper Manager, said “We teamed up with TradingPartners to look at all areas of spend because we thought it would bring some savings. We were already planning to re-tender the sheet-fed magazines, so the project came at the right time for us. TradingPartners worked with the RBI supplier list and after an intense period of exchanging information, nine suppliers who could meet our start prices, went on to compete in the eAuction.”
The 15 magazines were divided into three groups. Each group contained one lot for the printing alone, and another for the printing and the paper. This allowed suppliers to bid for up to six lots at the same time.
The eAuction, held at RBI’s UK head office in Surrey, got off to a lively start as suppliers fought to out-bid each other. Senior managers from other parts of the Reed Elsevier, RBI’s parent organisation, watched the action with great interest from one of the viewing rooms.
The Results
When the event ended 78 minutes later, the final bids represented savings of 12%, well surpassing expectations.
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arianne Bushell added, “We were very pleased with the result. The saving was much better than we had anticipated. The project has saved us a great deal of time and money. Now we are looking at other areas of spend, where we can make similar gains working with TradingPartners. Bringing all this together helped us see that we could focus more clearly on relationships with our suppliers. It means we can be more systematic in our approach and make sure we gain maximum benefit from our supplier relationships.”
TradingPartners Account Manager, Cara Frampton, said it was clear from the start that RBI knew their supplier market. TradingPartners enabled the client to take a renewed look at the supplier base and receive prices for different procurement scenarios during a ‘real-time’ dynamic negotiation.
“As it was a category new to the auction process, it was a complex project and required a lot of preparation. We delivered to the timescales however, and achieved a really good result which meant that RBI was able to obtain the lowest market prices possible for their sheet-fed magazines.”
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