Personal matchmaking web sites grab a lot of attention. It must be because they capture our imagination, or at least the imaginations of those who use them. The fact of the matter is that two of the writer’s own daughters are now married as a result of meeting their true loves on e-Harmony. As you can imagine, the result of this matchmaking ended as a rather expensive proposition, at least for the bride's family. Yet, there is another side to matchmaking that is practical and can offer significant cost savings in the business world.

Take, for instance, a new methodology that automatically matches companies that are looking for suppliers with suppliers that are looking for work. It identifies suppliers that can produce a product or provide a service based on specifications submitted by the buyer. Since the buyer pre-selects the suppliers to be in its network, quality and delivery requirements are not compromised with unknown vendors. It is somewhat like selecting in advance who you would like to have in your network of personal matchmaking possibilities, so that you would never have to go on a blind date. You would have already pre-selected everyone in your network.

The added beauty of this new procurement methodology is that it allows (even encourages) low ball bids by suppliers looking to fill open production time in such a way that low bidding does not stigmatize the bidding supplier. Traditional procurement methodologies penalize low bids, because they lower future price expectations by the buyer. With this newly patented methodology (U. S. Patent No.7,451,106), all involved -- buyers and suppliers -- know that each project is a new beginning. Open production time will vary from supplier to supplier, so that who submits low bids also will vary. Higher market bids will come in if a supplier has a busy schedule.

Print is an excellent example of how this works. If a particular print supplier is doing a repetitive job for a buyer, and that supplier attempts to raise its historical charges because it is very busy, the supplier creates a high risk of losing the buyer’s account. Likewise, if the supplier has downtime and approaches the buyer to request early release of the job in exchange for a significant (say 50%) price reduction, the buyer will expect the price to remain at the new (now 50%) lower price on future jobs and may well become aggravated at the supplier, since the supplier would seem to have been overcharging for the job since the beginning.

Consequently, with this new approach print suppliers are submitting bids 30% to 60% lower to fill production downtime. Not only is the buyer saving that much on direct mail
, marketing materials, commercial print, labels and custom packaging materials, but the supplier is increasing its revenue through what is called contribution pricing. When used strategically and consistently, this methodology will reduce the buyer’s historical pricing by 42%, while filling the print supplier’s otherwise unused production capacity, thus producing an increase in the supplier's profits of about 10 points.