TGP Case Study: Financial Solutions Company - Driving printing strategy with BI

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Situation

A financial services solutions company needed to reduce a client's costs by 12% in the down economy - or risk losing the client. The company's marketing communications group fulfilled regulatory and unregulated marketing materials from a central warehouse upon consumer requests.

The volume of consumer requests fluctuated dramatically by financial product and marketing material types, making predicting demand for marketing material difficult. As a result, printing waste and warehousing costs rose.

Challenges

TGP completed a data audit of their fulfillment data system to identify opportunities to save their clients money, while at the same time identifying opportunities to sell-in print-on-demand services. The company hypothesized that the savings in warehousing costs, receipt fees, and shipping costs would justify the additional costs of the print-on-demand services they were pitching.

Outcome

TGP performed the analysis in two stages. In the first stage, TGP analyzed data extracts from the inventory flows database, immediately identifying that a large percentage of marketing material was never mailed to consumers. TGP's analysis and presentation helped all levels of management immediately understand the scope of the waste, and the opportunity to decrease client cost by implementing their higher margin but more efficient print-on-demand service.

Note how the material received into the warehouse (green lines) were mostly destroyed (red lines) at the end of the material’s lifecycle. This was a common pattern across many material types, a consequence of systematic over ordering by the client.

In the second stage, TGP built a business intelligence tool to optimize the printing strategy of the client. The tool demonstrated that by following a printing strategy that involved a 40% print-on-demand component, the client could save upwards of $700,000 in printing costs over three years, far outstripping the 12% in warehousing fees they were looking to cut. At the same time, the solutions company (TGP's client) would earn hundreds of thousands of dollars in printing fees.

ROI on TGP Effort

TGP identified savings and potential earnings worth dozens of times our fee, and provided the solutions company the means to replicate those results across many other clients. A less than $100K investment resulted in $700,000 of savings for the first client and new revenue for our client, with the potential to replicate the solution across the existing client base.