Global Enterprises Secret Weapon for Offsetting Tariffs and Rightsizing Margins: Bigger, Faster Wins in Freight Procurement

In this engaging session, we’ll hear from leaders at Standard Industries and Solventum about how they leveraged Arkestro to unlock a new business approach to rate management across their portfolio of logistics to achieve a continuous cost improvement, improved contract utilization (and decrease in last-minute spot quotes) with qualified preferred carriers.

• Solventum Delivers Bigger Wins To Offset Tariff Costs in Days, Not Weeks: Solventum aimed to create a transformative ocean freight program using Predictive AI to simulate the process of quoting ocean lanes and accessorial fees prior to the event and then executing a game theoretic negotiation. The key? Completing the awarding process in a matter of days rather than weeks or months, and driving an unexpectedly high-impact savings result. Solventum had traditionally requested quotes from ocean freight carriers using Excel. However, these quotes are often in different formats with complex accessorial fee structures, making them difficult to negotiate and award, especially when applying filters related to operational requirements and applying constraints such as the desired number of carriers. As a result, traditional freight negotiations took a long cycle and consumed a lot of procurement team bandwidth. Solventum sought to reduce the cycle time, hours per cycle, and also deliver a material business case to the C-suite. Using Predictive AI, they eliminated the step where suppliers create a quote, and in the process transformed their ocean freight costs.
   
• Standard Industries Goes Predictive With an Entire North American Logistics Network in Days, Enabling Effortless Repricing As Markets Change: Standard Logistics is the captive 3PL of Standard Industries responsible for managing 4k lanes with 300+ carriers across North America. Their annual bid process used to take months – until they implemented Predictive to reprice their freight network in days, unlocking double-digit cost savings and harvesting valuable performance and asset location data from their network of preferred carriers. With greater visibility into their asset portfolio, Standard Logistics can offer a higher quality of service, with their team of logistics procurement professionals now able to serve up strategic scenario comparisons that let their customers make business decisions driven by data around cost, performance, and capacity.

You will leave this session with a playbook to Go Predictive with Your Transportation and Freight in Days, Not Weeks that includes:

• Tactics for engaging stakeholders, including presentation templates and sample meeting agendas, including common talking points about reducing cost without sacrificing performance
   
• KPIs for Spend Under Prediction for Transportation and Freight, as well as a way to overcome challenges with data quality to track and report your cost impact
   
• Sample C-Level talk tracks connecting your Go Predictive with Freight initiative to enterprise-level initiatives around margin expansion and tariff adaptation