Cost Reduction & O2
UKOS estimates that only 60% cost of any order is the direct cost of product itself with the remaining 40% being taken up by indirect costs associated with inefficient stocking of products, ordering, invoicing , labour and distribution issues.
UKOS account managers take a pro-active stance with all of their clients to remove unnecessary costs from their businesses to ensure maximum value is obtained from each and every order.
Whilst a UKOS customer O2 benefited from this expert advice in a number of ways:
Pilferage
Office supplies often go home with employees as “fringe benefits”.
Indeed a recent survey by online recruiter Fish4jobs.co.uk found that small-scale pilfering and expense fraud is costing UK businesses up to £831 million per year.
UKOS helped O2 to reduce losses by providing true real time traceability via its online reporting and enquiry tools which monitored purchasing activity down to your individual employee level and allowed O2 to identify unusual ans suspecious ordering patterns.
Obsolescence
As supplies become obsolete, they lie ideal on stockroom shelves.
UKOS allowed O2 to impliment Next day ‘Just-In-Time’ delivery of 99.5% – mechanisms across all of its business units thereby eliminating the need for the office ‘Stockroom’.
UKOS web based control systems provides up to date information as to when products will be made obsolete allowing purchasing staff to run down supplys of soon to become obsolete products, thus reducing wastage.
Wastage
Too many office supplies are wasted, and can be found in desk drawers.
The UKOS ordering system used by O2 had approximately 450 users nationwide who placed orders directly over the internet, thus eliminating the necessity for individuals to ‘horde’ items further reducing wastage and cost.
Overall storage was significantly reduced due to next day delivery service levels of 99.5%.
24 hour immediate availability to order stationery via the web was made available to O2 purchasers up to 5pm, and receiving the goods next day removed the requirement to ‘bulk’ order goods.
Purchasing
Purchase orders, product investigation, buying records, seeking quotations and chasing deliveries are a hefty portion of the overall costs.
The Institute of Chartered Accountants suggests that the average cost of processing an invoice alone is £40 whilst a recent Deutsche Bank survey concluded that the cost may actually be twice this figure.
The UKOS web ordering system configured for O2 was a single source supply for all of its office stationery requirements and siginficiantly reduced costs associated with administration and paperwork.
All Purchase Orders are generated directly by O2 employees via the UKOS web system thereby reducing errors and delays.
Additionally the UKOS no quibble product returns policy coupled with unrivalled warehouse order fulfilment proccess resulting in a 0.9% return rate which again removed unnesecary costs from the its' business.
Accounting
Keeping accounting records, paying suppliers and charging back to departments contribute to the overall costs asscoaited with each purchase.
UKOS enabled O2 to reduce their number of suppliers.
Single monthly consolidated invoicing was provided to O2 in their required format, per division.
A full interface was designed and implemented to provide O2 with a direct invoice interface into the O2 Oracle financials computer system with fully validated OU codes, reducing costs on matching, posting and payment of invoices and virtually eliminated accounting queries.
