Staples Unveils Full Scope of Newly Integrated Business-to-Business Services With Launch of StaplesAdvantage.com

Staples Advantage, Framingham, Mass., the business-to-business division of Staples Inc., today announced the launch of its new Web site (StaplesAdvantage.com) to address customers' growing demands for supplier consolidation and reduced procurement costs. For the first time, current and prospective customers--from small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) to Fortune 1000 corporations--can view the full scale of Staples Advantage's products and services, including five newly integrated business-to-business service offerings: Business Interiors by Staples, Staples Technology Solutions, Staples Facility Solutions, Staples Print Solutions and Staples Promotional Products. Combined with Staples Advantage's complete selection of office products, these expanded capabilities represent the industry's most extensive offering of business products and services from one source.

With sales of more than $6 billion, Staples Advantage has become a driving force in the procurement world. Over 65 percent of Fortune 100 companies are Staples Advantage customers, as well as leading academic institutions, health care and pharmaceutical companies, and state and federal government agencies. As these organizations look to drive savings and improve efficiency by consolidating procurement across multiple functional areas, the new StaplesAdvantage.com provides tools and resources to address these needs.

"Businesses today are eager to create efficiencies in procurement given reduced human and capital resources," said Jay Baitler, executive vice president of Staples Advantage. "Our new StaplesAdvantage.com Web site helps our current and potential new customers understand how we can deliver much more than office supplies to support their supplier consolidation goals and find new opportunities for savings."

Over the past few years, many companies have increasingly turned to supplier consolidation as a way to reduce the costs and complexity of managing multiple suppliers. Recently, leading global organizations such as Kraft have publicly announced plans to consolidate suppliers with the expectation of significant savings in the coming years.

"Our benchmarks have consistently shown supplier rationalization to be a proven way that the best procurement organizations drive spend cost reduction," said Kurt Albertson, U.S. procurement advisory lead for The Hackett Group, a global strategic advisory firm. "Hackett's 2009 research shows that world-class procurement organizations have 22 percent fewer indirect suppliers than typical companies, and achieve more than twice the savings on indirect spending."