PathForward is uniquely positioned to reduce your costs and improve your business results. We sit on the client’s side of the table and apply objective, deep-domain expertise across your enterprise to help you achieve sourcing excellence and print supply chain excellence. Our client’s success is built on a holistic approach in which we assess your environment and align our proven methodologies to your specific situation. We achieve cost improvement by deploying Lean Six Sigma processes, sourcing excellence, enterprise technologies, industry partnerships and dedicated account management resources, all committed to perfect the win-win relationship. We believe in this approach. It has given Standard Register a competitive advantage as we have applied it internally, and we are confident it will provide PathForward clients a decisive advantage.
Here are five reasons why PathForward is the best partner for you:
- Our Proven Ability to Generate Measurable and Sustainable Savings – We Deliver!
Experience has demonstrated there is as much to be saved by delivering sourcing excellence as there is to be saved by delivering supply chain excellence. To date, PathForward's Print Supply Chain Services (PSCS) have resulted in an average net savings of 20% for our clients by achieving sourcing excellence. This buy-side savings is realized within the initial 6 to 18 month period. By focusing on supply chain excellence, we can help you achieve more durable savings with the full effects being seen in months 12 to 36 of our partnership.
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We achieve Sourcing Excellence:
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By aggregating, ganging and leveraging the considerable paper, print and fulfillment volume we currently manage for our clients. Our supply chain leverage and ability to source and fulfill has not been matched with any single customer that we have managed to date.
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By building and maintaining a world-class certified GlobalPrint Network® of suppliers while remaining flexible to incorporating customer-preferred suppliers. That said, the printers we introduce to our customers through our network provide the best pricing 94% of the time. At the same time, our GlobalPrint Network enables clients to meet tier-one spending requirements. Interesting to note, our MBE/WBE members win 54% of the deals for which they are invited to compete. Currently, our GlobalPrint Network includes a highly qualified supplier base of over 100 unique suppliers and over 200 manufacturing locations. We excel in nurturing these mission-critical relationships. Our clients enjoy the best the printing industry has to offer through our network.
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By bidding at the individual job level and matching each job to the core competencies of the printers we invite to the process. Our approach not only takes advantage of the excess capacity available in the market, it allows our GPN partners to do what they do best.
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By tracking the price from quote to delivery provides critical information for customers. Any changes to design, print or delivery specifications can result in add-on costs. In fact, just over 80% of all print jobs require change orders of some type. In analyzing the data, we can identify ways to improve processes and reduce costs. Our analysis of customers using contract pricing, rate cards and reverse auctions indicates that less than 20% of their jobs actually complied with quoted specifications, which resulted in increased spending of 30-40% more than the contracted price.
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Finally, PathForward sits on the customer’s side of the table – not as a printer, a broker or a disintermediator. We’re guided by cost and process improvement objectives that are in perfect alignment with our customers. We do not accept supplier rebates, and we provide 100% transparency to everything we do. We are liberated by not having the burden of keeping commercial printing plants at capacity. We prefer our clean-sheet approach. It’s a serious business model that is not dependent on taking rebates that rightfully should be passed along directly to the customer.
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We deliver Supply Chain Excellence:
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By providing serious focus on both the document lifecycle (from how a piece is conceived and designed to how it’s ultimately distributed, archived or confidentially destroyed) and all-related supply chains. This comprehensive approach sets PathForward apart from competing suppliers and helps ensure savings and improvements are enduring.
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By improving the performance of our certified GlobalPrint Network partners. Our Six Sigma Black Belt resources focus on streamlining front- and back-office operation workflows. By improving partner efficiencies and automating or assuming many of their tasks, PathForward is able to reduce the cost of their supply chain, thereby lowering the prices they submit to our customers. Savings are achieved by improving scheduling and document communications, and eliminating redundancies in sales, marketing, pre-press investments and paper mark-ups, etc.
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By targeting demand management. Given the pace of change, printing just in time wins out over printing just in case. In one of our Fortune 50 customers, poor demand management practices accounted for an average overrun of 40%.
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Our focus on designing for manufacturability and designing for digital provides clients multiple benefits. It gives them the ability to create highly personalized documents and communications, thereby creating greater relevance and driving higher response rates. Moreover, by migrating documents to on-demand and electronic distribution methodologies where appropriate, the costs of storage, distribution, waste and obsolescence are mitigated.
Poorly designed print is the #1 reason companies pay more for their print than they should. PathForward recently helped a Fortune 50 manufacturing company cut production-related costs by more than 100% by changing a single design component! An experienced agency designer had erred unintentionally. Fortunately, one of our PrintConcierges® discovered the problem and the savings were realized. |
- Our People and Processes – We Specialize and Innovate!
Our team of PrintConcierges are specialists. Optimizing print is all they do. They follow our credo, “Print Smart or Don’t Print at AllSM!” They average 20 years of experience as a team and get better every day.
Commercial print is not a commodity, but custom manufacturing with a process that is unique and highly variable from job to job. There are many software solutions that can be deployed to manage print sourcing. However, typically these tools are only effective if combined with a strong sourcing strategy, committed implementation personnel and on-going supply chain process management.
A combination of Six Sigma and Lean methodologies govern our decision-making relative to innovation, on-going process improvement, performance metric development, and scorecard creation to achieve both operational and management excellence. Focused on business process improvement, we help establish “less paper” goals and business rules, determine if and when each document should be printed, to which optimal output device and with which distribution priority. Since no two companies are exactly alike, neither are the solutions. We do not try to make your processes conform to a pre-defined solution, but create a “clean-sheet” solution that will enable you to meet or exceed your goals.
Through many successful experiences at Fortune 250 companies, PathForward has learned that the most critical success factor is not creating and deploying the solution, but ensuring that, once deployed, the customer realizes the forecasted benefits through end-user adoption. Successful change management cannot be taught, it must be learned. PathForward stands alone in our field, having grown a staff of highly experienced and adaptable change managers. We are building on Standard Register’s long-standing business focus on paperwork simplification.
Our philosophy is you can’t manage or improve what you can’t measure. It is for this reason that we integrate sophisticated performance metrics via our Master Dashboard to identify and fine-tune current versus optimized states, relative to the defined customer requirements. We implement technological controls and enablers to monitor and measure spending and vendor performance, in addition to capturing historical data for trend analysis and forecasting.
- Best-in-Class Technology – We Make It Easy!
Information Week magazine has selected Standard Register #43 on its InformationWeek 500 list of technology innovators. 2006 is the third consecutive year in which Standard Register has earned the distinction of being among the top 100. It’s both an honor and an affirmation of our continued commitment to technology advancement.
Our open, integrated, SMARTworks® enterprise software platform is best-in-class. It makes it easy for users to work and management to manage. SMARTworks delivers robust reporting through the Master Dashboard, which is an industry exclusive, unparalleled for the comprehensive view it provides.
The Master Dashboard is a fact-based, custom report card that can be integrated across all three print environments – from the office to production to commercial. The Master Dashboard is configurable at the device and user level, from cost to compliance and usage to performance, along with tools to measure vendor performance, price, quality and other service level agreements (SLAs) and/or Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), and metrics vs. industry benchmarks.
SMARTworks brings together unique technology toolsets that address all aspects of the document lifecycle as well as all three print environments. The result is a comprehensive, enterprise-wide platform that allows organizations to manage and report from a single portal.
SMARTworks has been proven to make it easy for its users to work and comply. In fact, over 67,000 active, end users representing over 1,300 client organizations and over 200 provider organizations utilize the platform to manage print procurement across our clients’ enterprises.
- Our Enterprise Approach – We Facilitate End-to-End Transformation!
Our clients’ successful transformations from transaction-based companies to enterprise services-led organizations have been facilitated by an end-to-end approach, which took them from analysis to strategy through implementation. We have experience with this type of transition. We have invested millions of dollars in resources and technologies to enable our clients in their transformation. Moreover, we’ve gained first-hand experience in implementing Standard Register’s own corporate transformation. The results we’ve seen internally, our growing success with our key customers, and the intensified interest from Fortune 1000 companies demonstrate that our investments have been well-placed. Whether the need is on-site, near-site or off-site, Standard Register’s integrated approach provides a strategic advantage to our clients.
- Our Account Management – We Serve!
Customer service and performance accountability is part of what defines Standard Register and PathForward. In our most recent customer loyalty survey conducted by Burke, 94% of our customers rank Standard Register in the top two tiers for overall satisfaction, with our highest scores achieved in three categories – Value, Trusted Business Partner and Most Likely to Recommend to Others. Like all of our facilities, our account management teams are “industrial strength,” providing clients the highest integrity and security.
The opportunity to serve and to partner with our customers is humbling. Standard Register aspires to do two things better than any other company in the world — to create innovative solutions relevant to our customers’ most pressing business challenges and to help our customers apply these solutions so they can transform their processes and achieve their desired business outcomes.
A premier document services provider, we are trusted by companies in healthcare, financial services, manufacturing and other industries to manage their business-critical documents – the documents they can’t live without. We work to maintain that trust every day. Our customers are confident in choosing Standard Register and PathForward because they recognize that we mitigate their risks and deliver substantial results.
We welcome the opportunity to partner with you.
Keith Nickoloff
President, PathForward
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