Thursday, August 9, 2007

Specification Gathering in Print Procurement

When purchasing print the key to getting what is desired is the specifications that are provided to the supplier. I will try to walk through the specification process. When specifying a print job two key elements can make the Quoting process go smoothly, Good Specifications, and Samples. (we will discuss samples in another post) Specifying the job is usually done through some sort of interview process. This process can be a formal or informal interview.


Formal Interview

The formal interview is conducted by asking a series of questions designed to get the job specs. This is usually performed as a meeting or phone interview in which the print buyer gleans the specification for the job from the requester (customer). A series of questions is usually on some sort of formal document or an experienced buyer may know the questions that need to be asked. I caution even the most veteran of buyers that "off the top of the head" is not the wisest way to gather specifications from a customer. Most of the time this can make a customer quite nervous about the overall outcome of the job being produced. If this is an external customer they may lose confidence and will walk away unsure if all of the information was gathered no matter how confident you may appear. I recommend using or at least have a form in front of you during the interview process. Whether you actually use it or not, having it out on the table will give the customer more confidence in your ability. It often times can be used as a prompt for your questions or to at least ensure that you have gathered all of the pertinent information. The drawback to a formal interview is that they can be time consuming and if you are like most buyers your days are pretty full already and it may be a couple of days to schedule and complete the interview. Often times the customer either perceives they do not have time or they REALLY don't have time before they need the job completed. A personal side note; I found blocking an hour per day off on my calendar will allow me time to do those urgent interviews and still get my work done for the day. The formal interview can also be conducted as a survey form that is submitted to the customer. I highly recommend this form either as a complete or as a preliminary to a meeting. This will give the customer an opportunity to answer at least the questions that they know and will expedite your meeting. In the formal meeting you simply need to review the answered questions and help the requester understand the unanswered ones.


Informal Interview

The informal interview is usually conducted by way of email, phone, fax, or sending a sample with chicken scratch all over it and your expected to interpret (my favorite). Any way you get these requests they can be time consuming and often key items can be missed. The buyer and customer usually go back and forth either by email or phone calls over and over. Usually, additional questions are prompted by suppliers after the buyer has submitted the RFQ and then you're putting undue delay on the project because you either have to guess at what the answers are or go back to the customer again and ask. This also does not give your customer a warm fuzzy feeling that they are going to get what they want.


I am a firm believer in the formal interview process and have found that it can be used in almost any industry. When I worked in the medical field I would use this strategy when working with a team of medical specialists wanting the latest and greatest medical device. Whether I knew how the piece of equipment worked or not was beside the point I could usually go to a potential suppliers web site and at least get the pertinent questions from the listed product specification information or from their marketing information. An hour of reading often times saved me three or four hours of back and forth questioning.


Building the interview form

When building an interview form I suggest creating one for each of the specific types of items you may purchase and to use them as templates. The reason for separate templates is because the questions you ask for an envelope job are going to be different than questions for a continuous form. No reason to know number of pages on an envelope! I challenge those buyers not using a template when interviewing to try it and see if the reaction you get from your customer changes. I think you will be pleasantly surprised at the reaction of your customers.


Was this helpful? I am always open for recommendations as to how to make this better and I invite those of you using a formal interview process to post your thoughts.

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