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Around 1750, a group of gentleman were brought together by their shared love of horseracing. Within two years, the Jockey Club, as it was then known, organised what is believed to be its first race meeting on Newmarket Heath. The rules that were drawn up for this inaugural event were gradually adopted by racecourses across the country and, before long, the Jockey Club took on the mantle of official governing body for the sport of kings.

Fast-forward 250 years and the Jockey Club is even more influential today than it was in the years following its formation. While it may have passed on responsibility for policing the sport to the Horseracing Regulatory Authority, the Jockey Club currently manages and operates 14 UK racetracks. While the club is a business, it’s an unusual one in the sense that all profits generated by its various divisions are re-invested back into racing.

So perhaps more so than a conventional business, it’s imperative that the club gets value for money throughout its supply chain. This factor was one of the reasons it turned to purchasing expert Ian Sidgwick last year. Sidgwick, who has a strong track record of working in the purchasing departments of major pharmaceutical companies (although earlier in his career he did briefly train as a photographic printer), joined the Jockey Club in March 2007, initially on a temporary contract basis. He‘s now employed permanently at the organisation‘s Cheltenham office as group purchasing director.

At the time, the Jockey Club, which looks after 14 racecourses at different sites with different cultures, was experimenting with centralised purchasing, explains Sidgwick. The racecourses were all predominantly doing their own thing in terms of purchasing and collectively they were spending quite a bit of money.

Sidgwick’s remit was to rationalise purchasing across the organisations’ sites and implement a more standardised approach. One of the areas he decided to tackle early on was the club’s print buying function. Because the racecourses were buying independently, no one knew how many print suppliers the Jockey Club was using. In addition, the organisation’s lack of a professional print buyer meant purchasing lacked focus and, as a result, it was not getting value for money.

User input
A previous attempt to standardise purchasing led to a sole print supplier being selected, but many of the member racecourses felt the measure had been imposed on them and that the approved supplier didn’t necessarily meet the needs of all of the stakeholders. So, to avoid any confusion this time around, Sidgwick formed a project team that consisted of representatives from across the Jockey Club’s portfolio of racecourses, both large and small.

Crucially, he also called on the services of a print expert. I’ve got a bit of understanding about print, but I wouldn’t claim to be a print expert, explains Sidgwick. I couldn’t recognise a B3 press at 400 yards, for example. So I got in print consultant Simon Hubner through the Buying Support Agency who knew print inside out.

One of Hubner’s first tasks was to make a presentation to the assembled team about the project, the specifics behind different printing techniques and where the organisation might be able to save money. He also laid out a basket of goods from the Jockey Club’s portfolio to show the stakeholders what their colleagues had been purchasing.

We had examples that varied in shape and size, and Simon analysed them for us, says Sidgwick. He said, ‘This uses this grammage and this uses this grammage. This has got matt lacquer and this one hasn’t. This one’s got gold foil block – do you know you’re paying extra for that? These foldouts are really costing us a lot of money, which is fine, but do you really want to spend that money on this?’. He made us look again at what we were buying and, from this exercise, we were able to seek cost optimisation and standardisation.

An important step towards achieving this goal was selecting a list of approved suppliers. Team members were asked to recommend existing suppliers they thought had the potential to be a national supplier for the organisation and, from this, five existing suppliers were selected alongside one that Sidgwick threw into the mix.

After the suppliers had been audited by Hubner and he was happy that they represented good value for money, he issued a print buyer’s guide that went out to all of the people within the organisation who had responsibility for buying print. In addition to explaining about the Jockey Club’s new approach to print purchasing, for each category of printed collateral – leaflets, brochures, tickets, etc – the guide listed who the best suppliers were, provided pricing information from the benchmarking exercise that had been part of the auditing process and also listed what extra features, such as laminating and foil blocking, would cost. The aim of this, says Sidgwick, was to steer people towards a standard low-cost specification.

To further keep control on costs, any print spend above £5,000 had to involve Hubner, who has been retained by the Jockey Club for three days a month. As part of this arrangement, Hubner will carry out regular audits to make sure that printers are still delivering competitive prices.

We couldn’t necessarily tell that we were getting value for money without Simon overseeing it, says Sidgwick. So, every six months, we will undertake an audit of all the suppliers and go through the data for each job they won and also each job they didn’t win and what they quoted for it, just to monitor that we’re maintaining that level of competitiveness.

Smart savings
In terms of overall savings, Sidgwick reckons that the Jockey Club could claw back up to 10% just by specifying a bit smarter.

As a rule of thumb, at the start of the project I said that we spend X on print and we should be able to save as much as 10%. I knew there was money there and I knew that it was good money, but normally that’s the way with purchasing projects: you could smell the money, but you couldn’t really count it.

Sidgwick says he’s already achieved a big yield since the new purchasing system went live in May and that bigger savings could be delivered by finding ways to standardise more – but not at a quality cost.

We don’t want to dumb down our print and make something cheap and nasty, he explains. Quality is important to us, so we want to still get something that is smart and prestigious, but inherently costs less.

CASE STUDY
Cheltenham 2008 season brochure
Each year, the Jockey Club produces a raft of different printed items to promote and support racing at its courses. One of its most high-profile tracks is Cheltenham, which hosts the prestigious Cheltenham Festival each year and is one of the biggest draws on the racing calendar.

The Jockey Club annually produces a brochure promoting racing at Cheltenham for the coming season, which runs from October to May. The festival itself takes place in March. This year’s brochure was commissioned by racing sales manager Craig Staddon, with the Buying Support Agency’s Simon Hubner playing a consultancy role in the production process.

Hubner reviewed the specification and whether or not we should have matt lamination and, through the buyers’ guide, he recommended three printers who were the preferred suppliers for big runs of glossy brochures, explains the Jockey Club’s group purchasing director Ian Sidgwick.

The brochure, which was A4 landscape, had a 6pp cover (printed on 250gsm silk), 32pp text (on 150gsm silk) and a 4pp centre insert (on 120gsm bond). It was then folded, stitched and trimmed. Seventy thousand of the brochures were produced, at a cost in the region of £20,000, and the job was handled by local printer Stoate & Bishop, who also printed a hospitality brochure, which was similar in size and appearance.

Sidgwick is delighted with the finished result – while proudly thumbing through a copy of the brochure, which features a distinctive green livery, he says that the quality is as good as it’s ever been, yet it was printed at a substantial cost saving.