The deal with Birmingham City Council covers print and electronic communications for leaflets, posters and direct mail, but not stationery or transactional print such as Council Tax mailings.
The contract goes live on the 1 June.
The deal replaces what the council described as an “antiquated system” where a variety of council departments were placing print work with around 250 different print firms.
Cllr Stewart Stacey, cabinet member for commissioning, contracting and improvement, said: “A total of £2.4m a year was being spent with no formal contract in place, meaning there were high transactional costs and no opportunity to get volume discounts.
“Even the council’s print commissioning team were using 70 different providers with individual directorates ignoring even them and buying from 180 more.”
Birmingham City Council is one of the largest local authorities in Europe. Earlier this year it revealed that it had to find £85.7m of cuts in the 2014-15 financial year as it tries to save £822m by 2018.
According to CDS print and creative services director David Burton, the marcomms deal will save the council at least £500,000 per year on its current £2.4m annual spend.
“That’s our challenge. But we believe that through our expert buying power and by working closely with the local supplier base and realising efficiencies, we’re quite happy with that level of saving,” said Burton.
“We’re delighted to be selected as Birmingham City Council's strategic partner in a contract that will transform the way that the organisation thinks about print.”
He also added that one of the conditions of the award was that CDS try to spend 100% of the value of the contract with print SMEs in a 30-mile radius of Birmingham city centre.
To this end, CDS ran a breakfast briefing in Birmingham where it invited “every print supplier we could find” in the Birmingham area, which resulted in CDS identifying 50 print firms that could help it fulfill the council’s marcomms print requirements.
However, Burton stressed that local suppliers would be benchmarked against national prices.
To help the council manage its spend, CDS will roll out its in-house CDS Print Portal for web-based ordering, which will be integrated into the Birmingham’s SAP system. Print Portal will also provide users with access to templating, catalogues (storage and fulfillment) and digital asset management.
The £25m-turnover group won the contract with Birmingham City Council via the Crown Commercial Services (CCS) Wider Public Sector Print Services framework, where CDS beat off competition from the three other members of the ‘Lot 1’ Managed Printing and eCommunications Services group: Xerox, 3M and Office Depot.
CCS is the organisation that absorbed the functions of the Government Procurement Service.
One of the goals of the CCS framework is to reduce the volume of print produced by local government, government departments and migrate print to “electronic solutions” wherever possible.
CDS has contracts covering print, design or e-communications with seven other local authorities: Essex, Surrey, London Borough of Sutton, London Borough of Waltham Forest, Northamptonshire, Buckinghamshire and Poole.
It’s part of the Baird Group and employs more than 200 staff.
