Our client was a leading regional energy company with a refining capacity of 300,000 barrels a day, shipped by rail car to over 1,100 branded retail sites, operations from 13 marine terminals and more than 7,000 employees.
The company supplies wholesale, commercial, and retail customers throughout Eastern Canada, Quebec, and New England. The freight market was in a period of extreme volatility when leadership sought SGS-Maine Pointe's assistance to help reduce the cost of retail and wholesale refinery products and build capabilities within procurement, logistics and operations functions.
Specific areas of concern included:
- A low-maturity and fragmented procurement and contracts organization
- Lack of comprehensive and consistent sourcing and procurement policies, procedures and practices across the enterprise
- Frequent noncompliance with policies and procedures that did exist
- Absence of ownership, accountability and initiative for supplier and service provider contracts, performance assurance and relationships
- A lack of in-house capabilities (people, process, technology)
- Under-developed safety procedures to manage the risk posed by unmanned delivery of volatile/hazardous product
- Sub-optimal rail car utilization
- Needed to analyze the relative crude-by-rail and crude by rail/water routing, transport cost alternatives and spread differentials from current supply to support strategic sourcing of midcontinent crude supply and transport to their refinery.
Download the Success Story PDF to see their results after working with SGS Maine Pointe...