When your company moves and right before a year-long lockdown you learn a lot of things. Priorities seem to have a different ring when the world goes a bit nuts. Now, the storage room where we keep all of our supplies from tape to boxes was put into my control. Originally, I believed this was simply a waste of my time and not going to be anything but a burden on me. Instead of simply brushing this task off, I decided to take it as a challenge to make this small burden a positive for my career. There is one policy that we do follow in our company and that is if you can save the company money then you will end up with half of what you saved. That is really the motivation that led me to take this task to heart. I wanted to show not only that I was a capable employee who cared about the company but when it comes to packaging supplies it was a truly important part of who we are because it represents our quality.
We had tons of different things in this room. This means that it does get used a good amount and especially since Covid-19 we have been doing a lot more marketing internally. We have to survive and that means cutting costs. That means we use, boxes, tape, and shipping items constantly. I had a whole list of all the costs for the last several months and that was part of the reason I was put in charge of this area was the extra charges being placed on it. The cost of these orders was starting to become two and three thousand dollars a month. This certainly adds up after a year and it was my goal to save as much as a could. In my honest opinion if I could save us 10% or even 20% that would be incredible.
I did what all good bean counters do and cataloged of all the packaging supplies we used every single day for each project. Then I went to the people doing our marketing and took down each and every item they used per project. I had them work on solving their marketing projects in different ways and I did it with them. I wanted to find the most efficient way to tape a box and to send a letter. It came down to man movements and also how much of a product they were using.
This meant I had to move onto a new place. Most of our shopping had been done in big box stores or Amazon for convenience. I noticed that Amazon had better prices but they didn’t offer discounts for large quantity orders. This meant that I knew there would be specific stores that cut out the middlemen who would do discounts. This led me to look at packaging supplies stores themselves. Then I started calling and asking questions about my position and what they thought I could do to lower costs. I started to learn more things about my new position and found out I could bid them against each other. It was a good move to cut costs and that is why we did it. I also got a nice bonus from saving so much money.
