Why have a "Procurement Strategy"

I thought I would start of my procurement blog, with a case study of one of my larger fleets I manage.

Whilst presenting to a potential customer the benefits of using a service from Zalda, the decision maker I was dealing with kept referring to how cheap he had been quoted for the replacement of the vans that were coming to the end of their contract by his local main dealer.  Staying composed & professional I kept on track with my presentation but I will confess to struggling to get his attention as he had already been sold a deal on a monthly price, but had not fully committed at this stage.

As part of our fact find I did ask if I could see the quotation that our client had received as the monthly payment was very competitive.  The quotations our client had received was based on a finance package that was completely incorrect for the business together with unacceptable final payment (which is an old finance trick to get the monthly payments lower) with a vehicle make & model that would not have been fit for purpose and caused the client problems during the 4 year contract he was about to be sold.

Once I had highlighted several areas that I felt the client could of been exposed too, the client asked us to prepare a procurement strategy based on our fact find during our meeting. 

Our presentation was completely different on what our client had already received from his local main dealer, we had proposed another vehicle manufacturer that would of suited the business due to the amount of mileage these vans were doing together with an alternative finance package that was a very tax efficient way to fund the vehicles, saving the company money.  However these changes did have a downside and that was the monthly cost has gone up by £80 per month, the upside was that the client had a better quality vehicle that would of been fit for purpose together with saving the client £16k at the end of the 4 years contract that we guessed would of been the shortfall of getting the final payment set at a wrong amount just to reduce the monthly cost, together with maximising any tax allowances the customer was entitled too.


Needless to say we won this customers business and have recently renewed and added 2 more vehicles to his fleet.


This is just one example why you should deal with a vehicle procurement consultant.


Thank you for taking the time to read my blog.

Carlo de Gregorio