Do you know how much time you and/or your staff spend pricing items, communicating with showrooms and vendors, creating proposals, placing purchase orders, expediting and tracking orders, and coordinating receiving? Chances are this is time lost and not billable.

No design firm is going to get rich pushing paper and dealing with the VERY important details that purchase order management requires.

As part of your Gibson Design Management membership, you have access to our Purchase Order Management team who can:
• price all of the items using your showrooms, vendors, and manufacturers
• create proposals for you to present at your client meetings
• create purchase orders and track all outstanding orders
• work closely with you as a purchasing manager

You will have one point person for all of your ordering needs. This person on our team becomes an integral member of your team. However, you don’t have to train her, manage her, or have extra equipment and space for her in your office.

“I was at a conference all day on Friday. When I returned from the conference I had all of my proposals ready and waiting for my next client meeting thanks to Gibson Design Management. If I wasn’t a GDM member, I either would not have been prepared for my client meeting or I would have had to miss my conference to prepare.”
- S. Wright, Allied ASID, Holistic Designer, New York, NY

How Does It Work?
• You, as the designer, select the items that you need priced
• This information is then communicated to your Senior Associate, Member Services that is part of your extended team through using our systems
• If you use Studio Designer, we login remotely to manage your purchasing system. If you use Studio Webware, we create a login for this web-based system. If you use a different accounting software, we can manage all of your purchase orders through our in-house system.
• Our team gets to work on pricing and creating the proposal for your client while you stay busy doing non-administrative tasks that actually build your business and your bottom line
• Once you have approval for items on the proposal from your client, your Senior Associate will work on placing all orders
• Every week, we will follow up on your orders, ensuring that any change in lead time or any issues that arise are quickly caught and communicated
• We ensure that all items are shipped and received and you arrange installation with your clients

How Do You Charge For This Service?
• Our Purchase Order Management services are charged as a percentage. Percentages are determined based on historical order amounts for your firm. We suggest that we build our management fee into the cost to your clients. This means that you make the same mark-up but actually expend none of your resources on purchasing. This builds your bottom line.

For more information about our membership that gives you access to our Purchase Order Management services and the rest of our professional staff, please contact Alexandra Gibson at alexandra@gibsondesignmanagement.com or 877.273.8902, ext. 704.