By Rich Payne

During a recession everyone is trying to find savings. All staff should try to find savings for their company immediately. Let me rephrase that slightly; all staff that would like their company to survive and wish to keep their jobs should be trying to find savings for their company immediately.

Why the focus on savings?
Of course there is the obvious answer: to save money. However, there are some other underlying factors behind a renewed focus on saving. Companies need to become more efficient, they know that their survival depends on a staff focused on being frugal and they need to demonstrate to investors that they are taking active steps to save money. If you are looking to save money elsewhere you will also be more frugal with your daily operations.

How do I get my ideas heard?
Some companies have effective procedures that can be used, but most old programs are not very effective or are ineffective. My company, and many others, have recognized the value of savings in these times and have created special proactive task forces to seek, review, and expedite dollar savings. If your company does not then you should funnel suggestions through your chain of command.

Hard dollars are the focus.
If you have a suggestion that everyone likes, which will give everyone a warm and fuzzy feeling, but it doesn’t save hard dollars it is going to carry little or no weight. Don’t clog up the system with pie-in-the-sky ideas. Prioritize your suggestions. Put immediate savings first; ideas that can be executed within 90 days. You can add five year plan ideas, but add them to the bottom of the list.

There are no Sacred Cows.
Everyone has some sacred cow in their organization—some situation with well-known potential savings yet something prevents the implementation. There are many reasons that a sacred cow exists; it can be a customer who doesn’t want their reports to change; it can be a manager who doesn’t like the new software company; it can be that the savings are not big enough to incur retraining staff members. (For some reason this reminds me of a manager who would only use Apple even when the entire agency went with PCs). In any case Sacred Cows are not on the table, let’s have some steak.

It takes money to save money.
The key here is that companies will spend money, especially for technology, if hard dollars can be realized. Don’t be discouraged if your idea requires a $50,000 investment in software as long as you can save $60,000.

Recognizing your effort.
You should support your company without recognition. However, companies should realize that recognition is a good motivating factor. Notice I said recognition of your effort. The company will also recognize if you are making no effort. On the other hand the company is looking for any savings $50, $500 or $50,000, no savings will go unrecognized.



You don’t need to hit a hole in one but you do need to play hard. Par will keep you in the game.

Where can I find savings?
This is where you get creative, the first thing is to start with your expenses, go down your budget list of all your expense categories and take a fresh look at your expenses. These are some non-industry specific ideas that you may want to consider.

Travel expenses.
As Jack Benny used to say, “Now cut that out.” Your company may have already cut your travel expenses. If you must travel, start taking a look at the actual expenses. These sound like common sense, but you may want to consider them. Use teleconferences instead of travel. Identify the cost of travel using mileage versus renting a car for the day with unlimited miles. This one surprises everyone because it is counter intuitive but it sometimes saves money—especially if you make a long round trip in one day. If you are planning to attend a conference that costs money to attend ask if the conference cost will be waived if you make a presentation for them. Sometimes you can purchase a sponsorship for less than the cost of the conference and get a free conference pass, which can be used by multiple staff. You should book airline travel in advance. Ask for corporate discounts at hotels.

Paper supplies.
The fastest way to make a direct impact on your paper costs is to start printing everything double sided. This usually requires you to select double-sided printing on your printer properties. Depending on the printer set up that you have you may be able to default the printing to double-sided. This could result in up to a 40 percent savings in paper.

Courier Services.
If you use a local courier service you may be able to incur some savings by allowing them to modify the pickup time. This allows the courier service to schedule more efficiently and they will pass part of the savings on to you. Reducing the number of runs may also be possible. National courier (FedEx, UPS, etc) costs may be identified by reviewing expenditures carefully. Having 18 letter packages for 9 locations may seem reasonable until you discover that seven branches are using sending only 1 package per week and the last branch is sending 11 per week. With both the local courier and the national courier savings can be incurred by establishing standards that consolidate work and you may be able to eliminate the need for any courier service by installing scanners.

Maintenance costs.
One of the first things that I do when I have a new piece of equipment is to amortize the cost of the maintenance contract to end on December 31. This sometimes results in tremendous savings in the current calendar year. If your maintenance contract comes up for renewal in June of this year and a year of maintenance is $12,000 you may be able to amortize the cost through December 31 and save $6,000 this year. Next year you will have to spend $12,000 and you will have to spend it in January instead of June. Review the actual maintenance calls that you have made this year and the criticality of your equipment. If my maintenance cost is $800 for a device that in not critical and that has had few or no repairs this year I may go naked on the maintenance. It is important that you let management know what you are doing in this case so that when a repair bill for $200 comes in next year they will understand the reason.

I hope this has motivated and helped you to focus on cost savings for you and your company. Perhaps the practical ideas may even save you and your company money. This article will also be posted on Information Zen (http://www.informationzen.org/) so that you can have an opportunity to respond back to me with your ideas for saving money and let me know if this has been helpful to you.

Rich Payne has been in the industry as a user for 18 years and noted for making insightful, practical humorous presentations. He is a regular contributor to Infonomics Magazine. He can be contacted through Information Zen. The photograph is by Chris Ellisor.

Rich is also a contribution writer to the blog, Information at Work.