In-house INtelligence provides an overview of the in-house community in the form of a series of charts based on data retrieved from an AIGA survey to which over 1,100 in-house designers responded. Special thanks to Randy Johnson, a practicing in-house designer, for the chart designs.
IN-house INtelligence: Chart 38 – Printer parley…
August 18, 2010 by John Dough
Beg my pardon, this is a silly question.
I have to admit that I had helped design this survey for AIGA and included this question because, anecdotally, I had heard stories of in-house design groups who were told to hand their files over to printers that were predetermined by Procurement and were then unable to have any communication with the printer after the handoff (which I’d say is pretty ridiculous). I was pleased to see that only 11% fell into this group. Still, even 11% seems high when considering the importance of designers partnering with the printers of their designs to ensure their successful execution.
At first it does seem like a silly question but its incredibly surprising that 11% don’t interact with printers or then again perhaps they are designers of online content?
Ah, Procurement. Let me tell you a story about Procurement. Since we have to involve them if jobs cost over $10,000, they must gather bids for printing the catalog my department produces.
Our contracts run fiscal year to fiscal year, so they started gathering bids a few months ago in anticipation of signing a new contract at the end of August. Luckily, the lowest bid was also the printer who has printed our catalog for the past several years, so we were fine with whom they wanted to award the contract.
However, when we were finally sent the bid documents, we realized that not only was that printer the only cold-web printer who was asked to submit a bid, but also that the illustrious agent in Procurement had totaled 2 different bids from that printer–one that included a UV-coated cover and the other that included a varnished cover–showing us that they do not know enough about printing to be able to read an estimate.
Needless to say, we are trying to get them to ask us for the specs AND a list of vendors who should be contacted, and let us review the actual estimates that come in. Should be fun.
Stella,
Thanks for pointing out a HUGE opportunity for in-house teams to provide an additional service to their companies and thereby raise their stature and value in the eyes of upper management and Finance.
All too often, Procurement staff are tasked with buying marketing services about which they have no expertise. As a result, companies overspend by literally millions of dollars for these services. By engaging in-house teams as “procurement advisors and consultants” many of the problems occurring with the purchasing of print, web and agency creative services can be solved.
This is a real bottom-line benefit that in-house teams can point out to the bean counters that they provide to the company.