Norwich, CT-based Consumers Interstate is an advanced industrial supplies distributor; doing business since 1947. Our e-commerce expertise is well recognized, and reflected in our patented Priority Program® for achieving lean procurement; used to advantage daily by hundreds of manufacturing and other businesses throughout New England. We are a large distributor with a warehouse in the Norwich Industrial Park, a fleet of trucks and many dedicated employees.
What products do we deliver?
The supplies that Consumers Interstate Corp. delivers are thousands of factory, industrial, janitorial, safety, office, printed and packaging supplies. (This product group can be 10-20% of all your MRO supplies but can account for over 50% of your activities.) Although these supplies can amount to a very low portion of your total spend they can take up a large portion of time in your company’s procurement process. Often these supplies are bought from many suppliers that create many deliveries, invoices and activities.
Getting a handle on these can help you consolidate, reduce paperwork and activities across many departments; purchasing, receiving, clerical, a/p.
CIC delivers just a portion of the overall group of factory supplies (10-20%). But these supplies can take up over 50% of the total activities.
How we help
We are ready to do the work for you. We use the principles of Lean manufacturing and apply them to the procurement process to eliminate waste and improve productivity.
Lean Procurement™ is our way to help you simplify. The procurement process as it relates to order entry, receiving, inventory control, accounts payable and budget controls for factory expense items.
We do the work for you. We’ve helped many manufacturers and businesses in New England add value with a streamlined procurement process. CIC will bring you a documented cost and time savings proposal all at no charge to you.
If you are ready to move the culture and take a look at a recommendation, call me or anyone at our company.
Our focus
Consumers Interstate Corporation has been focused on helping businesses improve their process of procuring supplies since the early 1980s. This has been our basic strategy and remains our strongest value. All of our improvements are focused on helping our customers procure their supplies more efficiently. This is what makes us valuable. We are a large distributor of factory and business supplies items since 1947 from Norwich, CT. and our delivery market is New England.
The Consolidation Principle- buying more from one place. “Tomorrow Comes Today©”
In the 1980s, we targeted consolidation as a principle to help customers. “New Systems in Buying©” was our slogan. Our sales strategy was “Source 1, 2, 3©” which focused on helping customers consolidate their ordering of supplies and helped them by us providing budget and usage information. We expanded our product lines to help our customers be able to buy more from us than any other supplier, ‘one-stop shopping’. In the 90s we acquired two supply companies to gain more expertise in safety and packaging supplies. This added to our expertise in janitorial, food service, industrial and shipping supplies. Plus, we began offering printed products, office supplies and corrugated boxes.
Streamlining the Procurement Process-helping customers reduce activities “Revolutionizing the Buying Process©”
In the 1990s, we formally trademarked the phrase Priority Program™ as the name of the relationship we establish with customers that work with us in order to help their procurement process become more efficient. We help by gathering the data about the full list of supplies you use, the number of suppliers, amount of invoices, excess freight charges, number of invoices and checks sent out and your total purchases of associated supplies. We created unique pre-printed order forms for the different user departments with just their list of products they used so they could easily create an order and fax it in. This really cut out activities. And we started making summary invoices, a once a month invoice with all the deliveries. This was another time savings activity.
The Priority Program™ is our most important customer relationship
The Priority Program™ was trademarked in 1992. It is the name of our customer relationship where we elevate your status based on your desire to use us as a single source to procure factory expense items in the most efficient streamlined process which we call Lean Procurement™. The Priority Program is our patented internet procurement method that allows you to buy supplies online in the most efficient manner. We organize factory expense items including: janitorial, paper, packaging, safety, office and maintenance supplies and deliver them in the most simplified manner using. Today we offer our web based ecommerce plan.
www.SuperSupplies.com launched- www.SuperSupplies.com -“make ordering easy©”
In 2000, we launched our ecommerce strategy to bring speed and accountability to our customers. Our website called www.SuperSupplies.com provides online order forms unique to each user and protected by a password. This really makes ordering fast and easy. The usage reports provided online create accountability and control. The site goes through continuous improvements primarily due to users that provide requests and direction to us.
The Internet Procurement Method Patent www.theinternetpatent.com
In 2005 the US Patent and Trademark Office awarded Consumers Interstate Corp. the business method patent for ‘ordering goods over the internet’. The patent #6,895,389 is our intellectual property which displays our expertise in helping a customer streamline their procurement process for supplies. The method uses our web based ecommerce to help make the ordering easy and fast. www.SuperSupplies.com is the integral part of the method.
Lean Procurement™ -eliminating waste and optimizing productivity in the procurement process
In 2007, we were awarded the registered trademark for the term Lean Procurement. Our best customers focus on being more efficient, productive and competitive. The lean manufacturing principles have become part of the daily life at many of the most competitive and efficient businesses. We help by focusing on making the procurement area as lean as possible using the technology of the internet and the basic commonsense principles ‘lean manufacturing’. We are experts in the field and have helped customers reduce their activities in their procurement process longer than any of our competitors. And the improvements to help you continue are part of our daily culture.
Lean Procurement is our way to help you simplify your procurement process.
If you are ready to move the culture and take a look at a recommendation, call me or anyone at our company.
Kenn
Kenn FischburgPresident
800-223-7475 ext 226
k@cicgo.com
