What We Sell
We sell paperclips.
And office coffee.
And toilet paper.
And face masks.
And chips.
And desk chairs.
And hats with your logo on it.
We are Guernsey, hear us roar!
Perhaps not so much. Yes, at Guernsey we sell consumables, standard bits and bobs for your workplace that you can get most anywhere. Interiors by Guernsey, on the other hand, sells more exciting things, like beautifully designed and optimized work spaces, but for the most part what we really offer aren’t pens and pencils or office suites and design services. What we sell is time and efficiency.
Ready to go shopping? Let's go!
Time and Efficiency
Guernsey brings you everything for your workplace, and in so doing we help you manage two key costs: Product Costs and Program Costs. Here’s how it works:
What We Manage:
Product Costs:The price of an item.
Program Costs:The costs of managing a workplace supply program. We break these down into acquisition, storage, distribution and accounting.
Product Costs
Minimizing the price of each item is essential to a cost-effective program, and it begins with purchasing. As a member of a national purchasing cooperative, we leverage its substantial group buying power to purchase product at costs comparable to those of our largest competitors.
"Without reducing the number of suppliers and concentrating on the few that matter, any aspirations towards effective performance management are doomed."
Program Costs
With storage, acquisition, distribution and accounting costs, it takes a pretty penny and more to manage your workplace supplies effort, and we work with our customers to target and decrease those costs. A recent McKinsey whitepaper notes, “without reducing the number of suppliers and concentrating on the few that matter, any aspirations towards effective performance management are doomed,” but vendor consolidation is only part of the solution.
Through advanced reporting and regular business reviews, Guernsey helps our customers identify purchasing patterns, then develop and implement cost-saving strategies via contract price changes and purchasing platform optimization. Popular solutions vary depending on the level of independent decision-making authority our customers allow their individual purchasers, including:
- Lists of best value items
-
Best value alternative product suggestions
- Best value automatic alternative product subbing
- Best value product selection limits
As you can see, we’ve looked at purchasing and procurement whitepapers from consulting companies like McKinsey and found some interesting similarities to our program. We won’t say we know everything—we definitely don’t—but there are a number of things we do know and can help with.
What it all means for you.
Before coming over to Guernsey, some of our customers were expected to store weeks’ or even months’ worth of product. Your storage space is a valuable asset, and so is the time you spend maintaining it. The time you spend hunting down different vendors for different lines, and the time accounting spends reconciling it all, is valuable too—and getting it out to each person when and where they need it? Come on.