One spoke for many when he noted simply: “Talent retention is a primary concern.”

While cost pressures remain intense, the data confirms a widespread view that cutting too deeply into an organization’s muscle — it’s talent — could seriously hamstring a fast return to growth.

The other comment underscores how companies are balancing the competing needs of cost reduction and talent management: “What differentiates the winners is their ability to use a scalpel and not a machete.”

In other words, pick reduction targets carefully — whether those targets are programs or people. Smart organizations are undertaking thorough assessments to understand people’s roles and contributions — and the return on investment they’re getting from various programs — to determine how and where to make cuts without adversely affecting business results both now and over time.

This reinforces the other message coming through clearly in the data: a realistic sense of the nature of the challenge and the balancing act required to maintain engagement and performance in the face of tough financial choices. Respondents anticipated a relatively slow return on their investments in cost cutting and appeared to be prepared for continuing challenges on the cost side while doing what they can to keep employees involved and focused.

Why is it important?

Energy management is the key to saving energy in your organisation. Much of the importance of energy saving stems from the global need to save energy – this global need affects energy prices, emissions targets and legislation, all of which lead to several compelling reasons why you should save energy at your organisation specifically.

Energy management is the key to saving energy in your organisation. Much of the Expense Reduction Analysts provide practical, engineered solutions to ensure they provide workable, measurable and tangible results and a speedy ROI.

Behaviours – If you get this sorted, you’re 60% of the way there. Simple changes in behaviour can quickly lead to significant energy savings but such changes will only happen if the people are aware of the energy consumption that they have the power to control. Most people will only be motivated when you can demonstrate just how much energy they are wasting and just how much potential there is for them to improve.

Use smart technology to do more with less – Whether this involves investing in simple high efficiency energy saving lighting, installing active lighting controls or improving your boiler efficiency we can assist you to evaluate which of the technologies present the biggest opportunities and what financial benefits they will deliver. Whether it means simply replacing light bulbs or a full blown building management system, our energy management specialist will help you to make the right choice.

Unit rates for energy – Are you paying competitive rates for your gas and electricity? Our dedicated team have the expertise and industry contacts to ensure you get the most competitive rates.

Sustainable Energy Sources – Whether you are considering solar thermal water heating, photovoltaic electricity generation or even wind turbines, choosing the right system that delivers actual benefits and a return on your investment – Expense Reduction Analysts can help you to fairly assess the benefits without being influenced by the sales talk.

“You don’t need your building’s occupants to gain a holistic awareness of energy consumption; you just need them to understand enough to stop wasting energy themselves!”

Making Sense of the UK’s CRC Energy Efficiency Scheme – The Carbon Reduction Commitment (CRC) Energy Efficiency Scheme is a government-managed carbon-trading scheme that aims to reduce the energy consumption of larger UK businesses and public-sector organisations.

The CRC scheme can seem complicated but our energy management specialists will cut through the jargon and help you through the minefield.

Continuous Improvement – To continuously improve your energy management, you need to be able to measure and manage your energy consumption – how can we help you to do this?

1. Measuring your energy consumption

2. Finding and quantifying opportunities to save energy

3. Targeting the opportunities to save energy

4. Tracking your progress at saving energy

Managing your energy consumption effectively is an ongoing process…

Our robust management tools enable us to provide concise data to assist you to manage the information without overloading you with large amounts of data.

Expense Reduction Analysts custom tool

We can measure and report on your results as regularly as you like, which will enable us to;

• Study your patterns of energy usage to identify wastage, to find opportunities for change and to suggest areas for improvement.
• Look for changes in your energy performance to evaluate the effect of improvements that you’ve made, to check whether your targets are being met and to provide evidence of your progress.

Such monitoring and targeting will improve your energy efficiency, reduce your carbon emissions and increase your profitability.

To find out more or talk to our Energy Management specialists Ian Morrison & Steve Clamp,

please contact Expense Reduction Analysts.

“We provide you with the information, so you can you make reliable choices about where to focus your time and money to deliver the best possible energy management results.”

Hybrid printing and mail what is it and how can it help my organisation save money

You’re probably familiar with VOIP (voice over IP) as used in Skype calls for reducing your telephone costs, but you many not be aware of PoIP (Post over IP), perhaps better known as ‘Hybrid mail’. Whichever you choose to call it, it can cut your print and mail costs by up to 60%. The term hybrid mail has been used in the printing industry for a few years now and until recently was only available to large organisations who produced and mailed millions of items of mail a year, but with improved digital printing technology hybrid mail is now accessible to all organisations regardless of size.

Organisations who send out regular communications be it appointment letters/cards, supporting marketing material, mailers, statements and invoices or reminder letters then hybrid mail should be considered as a serious option in reducing costs without the loss of service to your clients. If you take into account the total cost of printing and mailing your current documents, you may be quite astonished on the true cost of the service, an indication is provided in the vendor example. It indicates a simple letter or an invoice to a client sent traditionally then multiplied by a few hundred items a day can build up quite a cost to an organisation. Like all processes within an organisation, could it be done differently and challenged?

To outline the process, the user utilises the on-line tool provided by the print supplier. Data is simply sent to your chosen print provider in the same way you would select a desktop printer from your office. Select the type of document to be printed from your predefined templates, upload the data and that’s it, job done.

The print service provider will print your document at a highly secure printing hub, insert into the envelopes, address and send out in the post as per our agreed Service Level Agreement (sla) – all within your branding and corporate guidelines.

As the print provider is providing the service for a number of clients, you benefit from the maximum postage discounts and the provider will even optimise the sorting of the mail into geographical areas for further postal discounts whilst also reducing the carbon footprint of traditional mail.

All print providers work with encrypted data to ensure data security at all times and for financial institutes, most suppliers operate to APACS and ISO27001 standards.

For those organisations that have their own internal mail rooms, then hybrid mail can provide an even more cost effective solution, not only freeing up resources that could be utilised elsewhere within the organisation but also releasing valuable office space to revenue generating occupancy.

This article is from the latest Pixels2Print publication from our resident print experts. You can download a copy by clicking here.

2012 is already starting off where last year finished off with confidence in the printing sector remaining pessimistic. Within the last month, we have seen the demise of Stewarts in Edinburgh, ODC, the master franchiser of Kall Kwik and Prontaprint go into administration, as well as BGP, Butler, Tanner & Dennis, Polestar and the Wyndeham Group announcing large workforce consolidations and here we are not even halfway into January yet.

In a recent Printweek poll, 56% of those surveyed said that 2012 will be a worse year than 2011, whilst only 31% remained optimistic within the industry.

That said, it’s not all doom and gloom; continual advancement in the quality, speed and flexibility of digital technology and the investment by many print organisations in adding value services such as ‘cross media’ solutions is breathing new life into an industry that was supposedly moving towards supporting paperless offices in the 1980s.

Organisations are even more focused on best value from their print and marketing communications and maximising return on investment in the same way that an organisation would review the performance of the personnel within their sales teams.

Direct marketing, despite historically been saddled with the term ‘junk mail’, is developing into sophisticated personalised one on one marketing tools that can generate substantial revenue and income to an organisation, take the likes of the successful Tesco’s Clubcard campaigns. Print is a long way from being dead.

Therefore, with such rapid changes in technology and larger reliance on data services, combined with complex fulfilment and postal services, print can be an extremely complex and difficult to benchmark, monitor and measure best value. Combined with a decline in the print specific knowledge available within personnel now buying print services, it’s clear that this certainly is an area that organisations could be challenged.

It appears the questions are: If your print vendors are providing you with complex print projects, do you know if you are really getting best value? When was the last time you benchmarked and are you able to measure?

If the answer to any of these is ‘No’ or ‘Unsure’, then the print team at Expense Reduction Analysts can help you challenge in 2012.

This article is from the latest edition of Pixels2Print, a publication provided by our resident print experts. You can download a copy for free by clicking here

Linens Direct is a company that recognises the importance of managing its cost base, especially in the current economic climate. However, with a growing network of stores and a popular internet business to boot, its internal resources are fully committed to operating and growing the business.

This has left little time to focus on the kind of forensic, line-by-line scrutiny of expenditure required to generate significant savings or the market research needed to negotiate streamlined contracts with suppliers.

Karen Everson, Financial Controller, says: “I know that there are significant benefits to be achieved from a thorough review of costs and the impact clearly goes straight to the bottom line. But, despite the benefits, it’s just not feasible that we could find the time in-house to manage such a review; as the whole team already have demanding schedules.”

In business for over 18 years, Linens Direct sells a wide range of soft home furnishings through its network of 32 stores across the country as well as online.

The company’s solution to tackling its supplier costs has been to establish a partnership with cost, purchase and supplier management consultants, Expense Reduction Analysts, and during the four years the two companies have worked together on a number of different areas of expenditure to identify savings.

In many cases, these have been worth more than 30 per cent of the existing spend and have included stationery (where savings of 37 per cent were made), print (savings of 35 per cent), cash handling (savings of 31 per cent) and waste (savings of 29 per cent).

St John Rowntree, consultant at Expense Reduction Analysts, says: “Many of the savings we’ve achieved for Linens Direct have resulted not just from price negotiations, but from improved procurement and supply chain efficiencies that better suit the way the company operates.”

For example, over time stores in the chain had ended up with individual contracts for wastes services and these varied from private contractors to local authority collections, all with their own pricing structures and rates. Expense Reduction Analysts was able to streamline this important area of the company’s operations and put in place a centralised management system with a single point of contact to co-ordinate all charges and contracts.

Similarly, the contract for cash handling was reviewed and following a detailed review of processes and seasonal requirements, a rationalisation of cash collections was recommended resulting in savings of 41 per cent.

Good marketing is only one of the factors that lead to business success. There are three others that are also essential…

Factor 1

The quality and professionalism of your service. The better your service, the higher the demand. The better the quality, the more success you will see. This doesn’t guarantee success but it’s hard to have it without it.

Factor 2

Your mindset or attitude. This isn’t about positive thinking, but thinking that is aware and awake. Those who can stand calmly amidst outer chaos and confusion, make good decisions and take effective actions, despite fears and doubts, will always triumph.

Factor 3

The ability to communicate the value of your services. Marketing is all about getting your message across in such a way that it generates enough attention and interest to move people into action. Almost anyone can be a better marketer. And the worse the economy, the more important it is.

(Courtesy Will Kintish)

They are QR (Quick Response) codes, also known as 2D bar codes, and may appear in magazines, on signs, on buses, on business cards, or on almost any object about which users might need information. Users with a camera phone equipped with the correct reader application can scan the image of the QR code to display text, contact information, connect to a wireless network, or open a web page in the phone’s browser.

Many Android, Nokia, and Blackberry handsets come with QR code readers installed. QR reader software is available for most mobile platforms. Moreover, there are a number of online QR code generators which enable users to create QR codes for their own needs.

However, there have been warnings from mobile security firms, who are urging caution over the use of QR Codes on smartphones, claiming that they could become a likely target for hackers and malicious users. So watch out, because while QR codes make things run faster and easier, they can also pose a threat to your mobile security as you don’t know what you are downloading until it’s on your phone already. Nobody would use a laptop without some sort of specific anti-virus and internet security, but how secure is your smartphone?

With so much uncertaintainty and change occuring within the print sector, many organisations are nervous about their print spends for 2012/13.

To balance out the negativity, Expense Reduction Analysts have released the latest copy of Pixels2Print a dedicated publication which highlights changes within the print industry as well as opportunities for organisations to reduce their costs and save money.

You can download a copy for free by clicking here.

Rather than the more traditional marketing methods, building a network of referral sources can provide a cost effective route to potential new clients.

However, productive networking is not just about handing out business cards. Here are 5 Top Tips to effective networking:

1. Be visible and well-liked! Know lots of people and be sure they know you.

2. You have to give before you can expect to receive, so be known as a generous person with lots to give.

3. Reach beyond your “inner circle” for business connections. Look to anyone who connects with lots of people and who does not compete with you as a potential partner.

4. Make sure your networking connections are mutually beneficial. Referring clients must make business sense to both sides, so make sure your work provides additional income, or other benefits for your referral sources.

5. Remember, most successful businesses only need 3-5 great referral sources. Select and cultivate them wisely and patiently, it will pay huge dividends and reduce your marketing costs.

Many businesses’ half-year profits are making for gloomy reading in the face of ongoing economic uncertainty, yet Premier Foods has vowed to slash logistics cost by £20million. Is the view of organisations such as this simply blind optimism, or are there really savings still to be made that are ripe for the picking?

While many may find the idea of squeezing their logistics and supply chains even further an absurd one, having tightened their belts significantly during the past few years and with fuel prices rocketing, a thorough review of operations can still reap rewards.

Logistics is not just about managing rising fuel prices and getting goods from A to B as cheaply and quickly as possible. Many other factors also need to be considered that can make all the difference to overall costs – for example, speed to market, supply chain efficiency and fluctuating exchange rates.

This is an excerpt from Logistics & Transport focus, the full article can be downloaded from here.