The solution is designed to modernize the traditional freight procurement process by allowing shippers to calibrate carrier commitments and optimize their freight spend.
Understanding the differences between purchasing and sourcing is vital for fleet management specialists who want to maximize the value of their assets.
A new vision of fleet management is emerging, helping to increase fleet managers’ perceived value to senior management.
To be successful on a sourcing team, you need to be open-minded about exploring all available service channels and partners. However, open-minded doesn’t mean being open-headed. You must listen and entertain new ideas, but also temper such a practice and attitude with pragmatism and knowledge.
The strategic procurement process typically involves a multifunctional sourcing team. This cross-functional team often designates a “gatekeeper” responsible for controlling the flow of information to the group. When selecting a fleet supplier, I strongly believe the fleet manager needs to be the gatekeeper. Here are the arguments supporting this assertion.
Many interdepartmental and operational conflicts that intersect at fleet are typically driven by the challenge of balancing HR/driver requirements versus finance/procurement requirements, which are often at odds, with the gains in one area negatively impacting the other. And, the hard reality is not all department or operational managers are team players and, as a result, there are the inevitable interdepartmental (and personal) conflicts.
Until the emergence of strategic sourcing in the 1990s, procurement did not hold the same prominence within corporations as it does today. Nowadays, procurement plays a pivotal strategic role. Procurement is now the new engine of change in fleet management, which has resulted in dramatic changes in the fleet purchasing and supplier selection process.
When you examine the seminal events of fleet management over the past 30 years, most were driven by changes in tax law, the introduction of governmental mandates,and adoption of new technologies. Looking to the future, we should probably expect more of the same.
Corporate procurement departments are becoming the engines of change in fleet management at Fortune 500 companies. The emergence of strategic sourcing in the 1990s is rapidly altering corporate purchasing and increasingly forcing change in fleet purchasing and the supplier selection process.
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