THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Tuesday, March 21, 1995 TAG: 9503210309
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: D1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY MYLENE MANGALINDAN, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Medium: 73 lines
Standard Forms Inc. sells $70 million worth of business forms, office supplies and envelopes each year while keeping tabs on orders to make sure that clients' employees aren't converting office supplies to school supplies for their kids.
Tracking its customers' supply orders electronically is one way the 68-year-old Norfolk company has managed to carve out a multimillion-dollar business that includes 17 offices on the East Coast.
SFI, which employs 275 people, prints and distributes business forms as well as janitorial and office supplies. Orchestrating the flow of products is SFI's computer network system, which allows customers to order their own supplies and control their inhouse inventory from their offices.
Most recently, SFI acquired three Atlanta-area firms - two that specialize in forms management and one in commercial printing - at the beginning of March in an effort to penetrate deeper into the South.
``Obviously, technology has forced us to keep up,'' president Tom Cunningham said. ``If you're not electronic in our industry, in fact, any industry, you're a dying breed.''
SFI allows customers to cut down on inventory by using ``just-in-time'' printing and print management. Rather than keeping warehouses stocked with business forms, a corporation can order stationery via computer and receive it in one to two days.
This cuts down on storage and inventory costs, and gives clients control.
The firm's print-management system allows customers to view and budget its supplies electronically. SFI can monitor a company's use of pens, for example, which disappear from offices most rapidly in September with the start of school.
It can limit the release of orders during a particular period unless it receives approval from corporate headquarters. Its warehouses will not distribute the supplies until the appropriate manager or executive OKs the order request.
Fierce competition in the $10 billion business-forms industry plays another another factor in SFI's attempt to stay nimble and adapt to new technology.
Technology investments cost the firm heavily. New hardware equipment totaled $1.7 million over the past two years, said Mark Resh, data processing manager. New software cost SFI $1.8 million during that same period.
But with clients ranging from small businesses in Hampton Roads to national corporate customers like Aetna Life Co., Reynolds Metal and Circuit City, the distributor has to stay on the cutting edge.
Since Chairman Tom D'Agostino merged his firm Forms and Peripherals, a paper and office supply distributor, into SFI in 1988, he has embarked on a course that embraces new technology that streamlines and facilitates its services. The merger created a $23 million firm.
Currently, the company is developing an icon-based system - where symbols signify actions or programs - with Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft to make its system even easier for customers to use.
``By the turn of the century, in most larger corporations, we feel everything is going to be ordered electronically. These hard-copy type of purchases will be a thing of the past,'' Cunningham said of purchase-order forms.
``They can order a variety of products: advertising specialities, printed products, office supplies, janitorial supplies. It'll be a one-stop shop.'' ILLUSTRATION: Color photo
BILL TIERNAN/Staff
Tom Cunningham is president of Standard Forms Inc., which prints and
distributes business forms as well as janitorial and office
supplies.
by CNB