I am in charge of procurement for an architectural design and engineering firm in the Dallas/Fort Worth area. We run a rather large operation and have some three hundred employees in our facility. We are currently occupying office space on a lease in a high rise building in downtown Fort Worth. We have sole occupancy of the twenty-ninth and thirtieth floors.
Our current budget for consumable office supplies is six hundred thousand a year, or fifty thousand a month. This budget specifically excludes our data warehousing costs and printer leases. These all fall under separate outside vendors. While this may seem high, it includes all of the consumables that our people need in the course of their duties. A few examples of just the paper we use are standard copy paper, legal paper, writing tablets, memo books, grid paper, and post-it notes.
While all of this paper adds up, our biggest expense is the CAD (Computer Aided Design) paper rolls. These rolls are what we print our designs out on, in various sizes, for our internal and external customers. We have machines that print eighteen, twenty-four, thirty, and thirty-six inches wide. One design typically goes through many changes, so each project might have well over ten versions with ten to one hundred copies of each. That is a lot of paper!
When you are shopping for CAD paper vendors, I highly recommend choosing a firm that has a good reputation, a great customer service department, and an established supply chain. If you have a major print project and need additional rolls, you want to make sure that the vendor can get you what you need in an expedient manner.
The largest portion of our budget is for our computer leases. Of our three hundred employees, two hundred have laptops and docking stations and the other hundred have desktop workstations. The laptop setup costs us one thousand per unit per year and the desktop is eight hundred.
We cycle these computers off lease every year on a staggered basis. There is no disposal fee if we renew our lease. This means every year those with a machine that is two years old will be upgraded to a new machine. This is their opportunity to request a new type of computer if they so desire.
We own all of the office furniture in our facility. That was a huge cost up front, but desks don’t become obsolete in a few years like computers do. If you’re setting up an office, I recommend buying your furniture and leasing your computers. That keeps your technology department up to date and out of the computer resale business.
The remainder of our budget is spent on what most offices spend their money on, pens, pencils, dry erase supplies, highlighters, etc. We keep these items in stock in our four supply rooms and rely on an honor system to ensure that our employees don’t pilfer or hoard the supplies. So far, we have had no problems.
Good luck in meeting your procurement needs!
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