This approach is tailor-made for ordering custom goods and services, such as print. Custom goods and services must be specification defined when ordered. They are not off-the-shelf and cannot be ordered from a warehouse.
For instance, a transportation/freight services provider procures print for a wide variety of internal and external applications. These include direct mail, marketing and promotional material, manuals, forms and labels and internal publications. Over a period of several months, using AVS Technology, a recommended set of best procurement practices, and a robust communications and workflow management system, the company ordered 54 print jobs for which the average value of each job was $6,288. Bids from printers for the projects ranged from $168 to $154,975. The market savings achieved for this body of work was 37 percent, comparing the cost using the new procurement approach with what the cost would have been if the buyer had used traditional methods that rely upon negotiated prices with a limited number of vendors.