Safety Supplies – Choctaw-Kaul

Buyer Details:
Member Industry: Advertising and Marketing
Revenue: $1.4 billion
Employees: 5,800

Existing Condition
An advertising and marketing solutions company decided to tackle an indirect spend category that had little to do with its main business but was indispensable spend for fifteen locations: safety supplies. At the company’s printing and direct mail facilities, safety gloves, hearing protection and safety glasses are critical for the well-being of the employees. The company’s procurement department began examining the company-wide safety supplies spend and discovered that they had multiple suppliers, sparse information on what items were purchased, and no standardization of supplies. Wanting to remedy the situation but not knowing which supplier to mandate or how to implement, the marketing company turned to Corporate United for help.

Solution
The first benefit of enlisting Corporate United to help with the safety supplies category was simple: it left time for the marketing company’s procurement department to source categories essential to the business. With only due diligence to complete on Choctaw-Kaul, Corporate United’s preferred safety supplies provider, the company avoided the time and resources it would have required to source the category themselves.

Convinced that Choctaw-Kaul could meet all their safety supplies needs, the purchasing team passed on what little spend detail they had to Corporate United for a category assessment. The GPO developed a category assessment proposal based on the marketing company’s cost and service requirements, and Choctaw-Kaul proved itself capable of meeting or exceeding all the necessary terms.

Results
The marketing company completed a national implementation with the help of Corporate United’s Director of Implementations, and they quickly begin to see the hard evidence of the leverage that Corporate United’s agreement with Choctaw-Kaul offers. By consolidating their spend with Choctaw-Kaul, the marketing company finally received an overview of their purchases. Finding such value in simply understanding their spend, the procurement team added a phase two for the project; Choctaw-Kaul began working directly with the team to standardize purchased supplies.

With Choctaw-Kaul consulting on a standard list of best value items, the marketing company sees even more leveraged volume – 21.79% in the second half of the year – as the safety supplies provider now works with fewer SKUs, resulting in simplified inventory management. As a result of working with Corporate United and Choctaw-Kaul, the advertising and marketing company’s procurement department can do more with its bottom-line savings.