Petroleum & Chemical Trucking Services Category Procurement Intelligence Report

Business practices within Petroleum & Chemical Trucking Services market are heavily influenced by changing trends across the category as well as within the broader Transport market. Suppliers are increasingly adopting a demand-driven planning of their assets and resources to reduce costs and optimize operational efficiency. Part of the cost savings are passed on to buyers, but this also creates supply chain risks for them that need to be managed jointly with the supplier.

Businesses are focused on maintaining a lean inventory of raw materials, parts, components and finished goods. While it is a novel concept to keep the inventory costs in check, it also highly challenging to implement in a global sourcing context and requires a clock work like optimization of logistics and warehousing processes. Companies are moving to a completely digital supply chain footprint to reduce errors and risks associated with such strategies.

Managing the logistics risks and building a resilient supply chain has taken the centerstage among corporate priorities. Companies are investing heavily to be able to detect disruptions in time and respond in a manner which does not put the core operations at risk. All suppliers within the ecosystem are expected to play their part and embrace the processes, tools and technologies that their customers have implemented to build a resilient supply chain.

As a result, category managers need to closely monitor the Petroleum & Chemical Trucking Services procurement trends and identify changes required in their procurement environment for the category.

It has become imperative for category managers to remain as agile as possible in terms of their procurement practices. However, it is not always easy to quickly spot and implement alternative practices in a category like Petroleum & Chemical Trucking Services. To help quick decision making, this report advises on several procurement best practices that have worked well for category managers.

For example, Buyers should enter in long-term partnerships and collaborative relationships with service providers to benefit from economies of scale and reduced cost. Long-term contracts are established to avoid renewal costs and avoid time spent on renegotiation.

Buyers should assess service providers' capability of predicting the weather, traffic, and other real-time information, which might affect shipments that are in transit or in its delivery times.

Buyers prefer to engage with service providers that offer robust technological systems and leverage Internet-based systems to reduce cost and simplify visibility across the supply chain. Buyers should also assess the integration capabilities of software platforms offered by service providers to ensure that there are no additional costs incurred for software implementation.

Petroleum & Chemical Trucking Services procurement managers also need to proactively identify and mitigate potential risks that can arise in the supply chain or contracts for Petroleum & Chemical Trucking Services procurement. Some examples include: