Fine Tune Named Supply & Demand Chain Executive’s 2023 Top Supply Chain Project

Award profiles innovative projects designed to automate, optimize, streamline and improve the supply chain.

CHICAGO, IL, US, June 14, 2023/EINPresswire.com/ -- Fine Tune, a leading provider of indirect expense management services, announced today that Supply & Demand Chain Executive, the only publication covering the entire global supply chain, has selected it as a recipient of the Top Supply Chain Projects Award for 2023.

The Top Supply Chain Projects award profiles innovative case study-type projects designed to automate, optimize, streamline and improve the supply chain.

Fine Tune is recognized for helping Briggs Equipment, a full-service material handling company, consolidate, optimize and improve their uniform rental program to achieve 36% category savings.

At the outset of Briggs Equipment and Fine Tune’s partnership, Fine Tune found through both analysis and input from Briggs’s leadership that their uniform rental program necessitated solutions in a few major areas:

• Briggs’s uniform spend had recently begun skyrocketing due to brazen overcharges on the products and services they were using.
• Not only were their uniform program costs increasing, but they were paying those inflated costs for what were extremely old and worn-out uniforms.
• Additionally, their locations were serviced by two different uniform suppliers, adding to the complexity of managing the program and leading to less favorable contracts.
• And finally, the overarching hurdle Briggs faced was a lack of resources and expertise required to navigate and find optimal solutions to these and other problems that come with the complex nature of the uniform rental category, nor the time and know-how required to ensure the results of the solutions stuck—and that their costs didn’t immediately grow post-implementation.

Utilizing its proprietary technology, the Program Assessment Tool (PAT), as well as world-class industry expertise, Fine Tune began with an in-depth analysis on Briggs Equipment’s incumbent program, comparing it against RFP results and subsequent negotiations. This generated a clear and concise “picture” of Briggs’s current situation vs. all possible options, and boiled down the complexity of the category and program into something more accessible for Briggs’s leadership to make the best and most informed decision on how to move forward.

Ultimately, the PAT showed—and Briggs Equipment’s leadership agreed—that the optimal path forward was to move the program under a single national agreement.

As a result of Fine Tune’s analysis, negotiation, implementation, and continuous management, Briggs Equipment has achieved and continues to achieve a multitude of benefits in the form of hard-dollar spend reduction, cost avoidance, and resource augmentation:

• Adding up to a cost avoidance of what would have easily amounted to tens of thousands of dollars, Fine Tune negotiated the replacement of all missing, ruined and worn-out uniforms at no cost to Briggs, as well as a reduction in transition liabilities to Briggs’s old suppliers.
• A $223,000 signing bonus was negotiated and secured for Briggs, paid by the supplier of the new national agreement.
• The hard-dollar savings driven by the project is estimated to comfortably exceed six figures, with an overall uniform rental category savings of 36%.
• The typical contract noncompliance prevalent in the uniform rental category is now identified, disputed, and recovered monthly by Fine Tune’s experts armed with Fine Tune’s proprietary technology platform, the Expense Management Optimization and Auditing Technology (eMOAT℠).
• Briggs’s resources are now freed up to focus on other priorities.

“As part of my job overseeing facilities and construction at Briggs, I was given the uniform rental category as well. It was eye opening having to manage 400 users and five different vendors overnight. At that point, I realized I needed expert help to make sense of this indirect category—one which was proving to be considerably complex,” said Jonathan Shamlian, Director of Real Estate, Briggs Equipment. “It’s true what they say—you just don’t know what you don’t know when it comes to these complex categories. Fine Tune’s expertise can’t be matched in-house—especially when your resources need time to work on other strategic corporate priorities.”

“From demand planning and forecasting to implementing the ultimate in warehouse automation, the past 12 months has seen companies within the supply chain and logistics space upgrade, enhance, adopt and adapt in order to achieve greater efficiency along the chain,” says Marina Mayer, Editor-in-Chief of Supply & Demand Chain Executive and Food Logistics. “That’s why it’s important today’s supply chains run on collaboration.”

“Companies partnered to implement each other’s software and technology and work smarter, together. And it's these partnerships that have enabled many supply chain organizations to better manage inventory, reduce costs, retain employees, track data and analytics and build resilience for whatever disruptions may lie ahead,” Mayer adds.

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About Fine Tune
Headquartered in Chicago, Illinois, Fine Tune partners with companies to source, negotiate, manage and audit certain complex indirect expense programs. Led by executive-level industry insiders, Fine Tune has also developed proprietary auditing software which monitors client invoices to ensure adherence with the implemented agreements. Several of the world’s most recognizable brands have chosen Fine Tune, including Cargill, Pep Boys, Advance Auto Parts, DuPont, and MilliporeSigma. For more information, visit www.FineTuneUS.com.

About Supply & Demand Chain Executive
Supply & Demand Chain Executive is the only supply chain publication covering the entire global supply chain, focusing on trucking, warehousing, packaging, procurement, risk management, professional development and more. Supply & Demand Chain Executive and sister publication Food Logistics also operate SCN Summit and Women in Supply Chain Forum. Go to www.SDCExec.com to learn more.

Richard Young
Fine Tune
ryoung@finetuneus.com
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