Get all of your stocking rooms packed up for less

Since I started working at home with the pandemic I now have seen that the cost of daily office supplies is pretty crazy.  I have even seen our companies budget and it is really high for this area.  I never imagined that our office would spend a thousand dollars a month on simple things like paper, packages, and labels. My work decided to trim down this year and well that meant losing a few people along with cutting budgets.  I am happy enough to have a job so when I was given the task of cutting costs in the daily office supplies to took the job seriously. I figured this task would not only reflect upon my skills but my ability to stay employed as well.  Now I wanted to find a way to get our company spending less and a way for our work at home people to benefit as well. 

Cutting costs for the company meant knowing our spending habits and how many of the items we really needed.  That was the start of understanding how to purchase in the long run for this office task. Our previous manager did not keep great records and that turned out to be a pretty big problem.  I had to take a whole month and track every item used and when and why. This was a big waste, but I knew it would pay off in the end.  Excell was a big help in this area and it allowed me to understand our companies needs.

It gave me a vast understanding of the paper products we used.   I knew how many cardboard boxes we shipped each month and how many labels we used for packages and cardboard boxes.  This small step gave me a true budget number to go on and now it was up to me to find a way to cut it. A lot of people try to get complicated and cut processes or change the way things or projects are done.  This is hard, time-consuming, and usually annoying to all involved. Instead, I simply wanted to cut the cost of all these products down to the lowest possible amount. From here I knew that I had to start shopping.  Easy shopping is generally going to be used and that is probably what got our company in trouble to start with. 

Obviously, Amazon was on the top of the list, but I know there is a big markup on all products sold on that platform.  I knew the exact amount of items I would need to get through an entire month so I put it all up in my cart to see what I could do.  This is what I am pretty sure my predecessor did as well.  But what this really did was give me a bottom-line price for easy shipping. 

Don't stop at what is easy, I went on to find more options. I wanted to look locally and see if I could find a good deal that was close to Amazon or even better, but I knew that would most likely not work.  So I called in some orders and sent my list to see what companies could do.  Then I went online and shopped the largest shipping supply companies and gave them my orders.  They sent quotes and I sent the competitor's quotes against each other. It turns out I was able to lower the costs from our original locations of shopping nearly in half.