Data Communications are the life stream of all businesses. Purchase orders, sales orders, invoices, cheques--the list is endless. In our business of selling business forms, our basic goal is to help customers reduce the cost of doing business. Business forms can reduce the cost of doing business. When we look closely at the real cost of business forms, we can see that there are three categories that we can define. 1. Processing Costs - This is the cost to use the form: Labour to hand write, type, or print the form 3. Printing Costs - This is the actual invoice amount that customers pay to have the forms printed and delivered. An independent research team found the breakdown of the three costs are as follows. 1.Processing 85% 2.File Maintenance 11% 3.Printing 4% The paper and ink itself represents less than 5% of the total costs. It makes sense then, that you should not only look at the printing costs, when you sell a form, but you should also look closely at how the form will be used in the end customers business. To illustrate, consider a standard multiple part form that is poorly designed and has no punching when it requires filing in a Shannon file. If it wastes several minutes of a $15,000 file clerks time, the cost goes up over $150.00 per thousand forms. If the actual printing cost was only $50.00 per thousand, this increases the total cost to over $200.00 per thousand. Suddenly, that $50.00 per thousand is not such a bargain. The next time youre asked to quote on a form, ask the following questions to try and get at some of the hidden costs of the form. Can this form be combined with another one? Nick Pizzitelli A-LINE FORMS INC. |
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