Delivering the Goods: How to Gain Traction with Your Transportation Improvement Projects

As the single highest cost component within the supply chain, shouldn’t any reasonable initiative proposed to improve transportation performance or reduce costs be met with open arms and, more important, an open checkbook?

Not really. Instead, it is both correct and necessary that, as supply chain and transportation professionals, we compete for resources and convince peers and superiors that our plans and proposals will deliver the desired result. In order to secure funding, we must make an airtight case for allocating the resources needed to achieve the savings or improvement we seek.

Gaining the level of support needed to make significant, sustainable and continuous progress toward increasing the strategic and tactical contribution of transportation to the overall health of the company becomes priority one. Achieving significant improvement frequently requires collaboration across all functional areas of the organization.

As transportation and supply chain professionals, we continuously balance strategy, planning and execution to respond to the market realities of costs, budgets and complex daily operations.

Overlay this balancing act onto your company’s often competing interests within the supply chain, not to mention resource demands from other departments, and it becomes clear that improving the health of your transportation operations can be a journey fraught with obstacles such as competition for resources, sub-optimal processes, cross-functional dysfunction and sometimes a boardroom struggle for respect.

To support the prioritization and implementation of transportation improvements, this paper outlines a realistic approach to identifying, planning and executing on transportation-related projects – from developing strategy and identifying opportunities to applying benchmarking and delivering results.