When Bob Pelon, came on board at Atlanta-based Cox Enterprises in 2001, his business card said director of procurement but he says his position then would more accurately be labeled "jellyfish herder."

"Basically, I was trying to corral and direct without getting too close and getting stung."

This was perhaps most clearly exemplified in Pelon's initiative to bring e-procurement into a company with many autonomous and highly decentralized subsidiaries and divisions. As a first step, Pelon wanted to determine what part of the company's buy—direct or indirect—could benefit most from e-procurement, so he talked with as many end-users at the company as he could and asked what took up the most of their time. Again and again, the answer came back that office supplies and paper products were a problem.

For example, Pelon says that when he joined the company, business cards cost $100 for one set, required the involvement of seven different people and took nearly 45 steps to complete. On top of that, the error rate for print materials overall was in the range of 18–22%. And even when Cox wasn't at fault for the mistake, says Pelon, it still cost the company money to correct it. There were no standard processes across the company for buying something like business cards, forms or other paper products simply because Cox's purchasing activity was historically so decentralized.

At this point, Pelon went to his suppliers. While he wanted to get more Cox employees on an e-procurement system, he first wanted to see how Cox's print suppliers would deal with e-procurement. Their main print supplier, Webb Mason, worked with Cox's system to streamline the print buying process and integrated their systems with Cox's e-procurement software, which is called Cox Marketplace internally. The strategy was that in the new system, when an employee needed to order a new form or business cards, they would go only through the Cox Marketplace website from start to finish and use only Cox-approved suppliers and contracts.

"We had the supplies categorized under the generic term of 'printing' and we didn't associate it specifically with a supplier," says Pelon. "We put the printing work through one site for speed, accuracy and results." This helped ensure Cox employees would use the designated and approved system for buying print, instead of trying to go out of their way to hire an unauthorized supplier.

Pelon also worked with office products suppliers like Webb Mason and Staples on treating Cox as one single customer, instead of a number of smaller, separate companies, in order to get prices lower and more consistent.

By pushing print transactions through the e-procurement system, which also supports Cox's p-card program, Pelon says maverick spend came under control. Business cards had a turnaround time of four to five days instead of 10, and took only three steps to order instead of the 45 previously. Error rates went down to less than 1%. Most importantly for both Cox and its suppliers, the cost for print buying went down by 20–30% overall, and the efficiency of the e-procurement system for suppliers allowed them to cut down the suppliers' operational costs. He used e-procurement and p-card data as proof of spend volume to justify savings on print products.

"We were able to dodge paper price increases because our ratio of people buying online was so high, we reduced the operating costs of our suppliers like Webb Mason or Staples," says Pelon. "And at the end of the day, we're trying to bring overall operating costs down, not beat the supplier up over price."

The use of an e-procurement system reduced turnaround time for almost all print-related products, so changes could be made much more quickly and easily, especially for time-sensitive materials like forms. Materials are shipped in under a week now instead of over three weeks, and this responsiveness has allowed Cox to eliminate its duplicate inventory—a nearly 20% operational cost cut. "Mistakes have gone down dramatically," says Pelon. "And now we're not using outdated forms—we can fix them within hours."

Webb Mason was a versatile enough supplier that it was able to work closely with Cox on the IT side as well as for the print buying customer support. "They made a great joint effort to work together to solve the challenge of decent rationalized buy," says Pelon. "They've grown with us over the past five to six years, and prices have naturally gone down." Webb Mason has been able to reduce their operating costs while working with Cox, says Pelon, which shows how capturing maverick spend in an e-procurement system benefits buyers and suppliers alike.