Strategic Sourcing for Specialty Courier Services

Corcentric’s courier cost reduction experts understand the sensitivity and criticality that comes along with specialty courier work and can work with your team to identify the providers best suited for your qualitative and quantitative requirements.

Transporting materials requires a special focus on service quality, especially when those products need to be refrigerated or can’t be exposed to the elements. For organizations that transport time sensitive and/or temperature controlled items, a standard freight or small parcel carrier isn’t enough – these shipments need the additional services and level of detail offered by a specialty courier. Our specialty courier sourcing experts understand the need to balance quality and costs, and can help you partner with a specialty courier specific to your needs.

Specialty couriers are focused on quality and can accommodate the different constraints and requirements associated with your shipment. Specialty couriers are able to provide the following as components of their service offering:

• Temperature Controlled Vehicles
• Dry Ice, Liquid Nitrogen, and Other Temperature Controls
• GPS Tracking of Shipments
• Last On, First Off Services
• And Other Value Added Services

These providers work with organizations in various industries from food services to pharmaceuticals to life sciences in areas such as ground shipping or air freight. They are able to provide a “white glove” service for your goods and have experience transporting all different types of materials, including hazardous materials and other sensitive items Corcentric understands the increased levels of sensitivity associated with specialty courier and has extensive experience working with these providers to ensure a best-in-class solution is available for your organization.

Our proven process for specialty courier strategic sourcing and cost reduction includes the following:

• Reviewing historical shipment usage, including shipper, lane details, frequencies, description of materials, and other qualitative considerations, such as days in transit and UN number.
• Understand your organizations transportation needs and other qualitative requirements.
• Developing a scope of work detailing all requirements and shipping profile, including lane details, frequencies, and other necessary fields for bidding purposes.
• Identifying specialty courier providers in the market with the experience and capabilities to provide services.
• Developing Request for Proposal documents, outlining scope requirements and soliciting information on capabilities, relevant experience, value added service offering, and other required qualitative information.
• Obtaining pricing information based on shipping profile provided, including detailed descriptions of cost structures and associated surcharges, such as temperature controlled charges and fuel surcharge.
• Evaluating supplier responses based on pre-established scoring criteria to determine finalist bidders.
• Negotiating pricing based on market intelligence gained through RFP process as well as subject matter expertise in order to gain most competitive pricing.
• Establishing a best-in-class agreement with awarded supplier(s) detailing services provided, pricing, and SLAs to ensure compliance with service level requirements.

Corcentric’s team of specialty courier cost reduction experts has the logistics category management expertise to help you optimize the specialty courier services spend category. Our specialty courier vendor cost reduction experts have experience working with clients from all different industries and transporting various types of materials. We understand the sensitive nature of these shipments and will work with your team to understand your specific transportation needs, identify the most qualified suppliers, secure the best possible pricing, terms, and conditions, and even help you implement the agreement.