The company
As part of a global transportation group with operations across 14 countries, this organization's North America branch supports more than 2,500 employees and a growing number of sourcing needs.
The company maintains a centralized procurement team, focused on maximizing savings, scaling RFP usage, and driving process efficiency. With fewer than ten team members, the procurement function needed to elevate their own output without increasing headcount.
The challenge
Operating within the high-volume, highly-regulated world of public transportation, the organization faced numerous challenges that strained their lean procurement function:
- Manual Sourcing Workflows: The team relied heavily on emails and phone calls to manage sourcing, resulting in long cycle times, excessive administrative burden, and minimal transparency.
- Limited Supplier Insights: Without a structured system to track quotes and communications, the team had little visibility into supplier behavior or pricing trends. This made it harder to compare offers, ensure fair competition, or uphold compliance standards.
- No Centralized Tooling: Without a centralized intake or sourcing system, the team struggled to keep processes consistent while demand grew, resulting in misaligned priorities and missed savings opportunities.
- Data and Audit Gaps: Tail spend management and sourcing activities were challenging to track and validate, which hindered spend analysis, inflated costs, and introduced compliance risk during audits or regulatory reviews.
With limited headcount and growing operational requirements, the organization needed a solution that could reduce manual tasks, enable process standardization, and offer real-time insight into sourcing activity. Their ideal solution would empower the team to scale without adding resources, while fostering faster cycle times, greater supplier participation, and reliable compliance tracking.
Selecting and implementing Fairmarkit
Initially brought on board to tackle tail spend, Fairmarkit quickly evolved into a broader transformation tool. As sourcing volume grew and manual processes became unsustainable, the organization expanded their partnership with Fairmarkit to bring efficiency, visibility, and structure to procurement at scale.
Fairmarkit stood out as the ideal platform for several key reasons:
- Operational Expansion: Beyond initial tail spend management, the organization leveraged Fairmarkit’s autonomous sourcing capabilities' to broaden sourcing strategies, including competitive RFPs, enabling strategic scaling without increasing headcount.
- Streamlined Communication and Compliance: Fairmarkit’s AI-powered workflows enabled transparent supplier engagement and real-time documentation of all quotes, greatly improving audit readiness.
- Tail Spend Optimization: Fairmarkit provided a centralized, digital alternative to email-driven sourcing, enabling unprecedented management of low- and mid-value spend.
Implementation began with small-scale pilots and expanded quickly across multiple categories. Fairmarkit’s customer success team worked closely with procurement leaders to refine workflows, support change management, and introduce strategic use cases. The result was a tailored, scalable solution that delivered immediate improvements in speed, supplier access, and process oversight.
Results
The transit operator’s partnership with Fairmarkit sparked a total procurement transformation, moving beyond isolated fixes to create a more agile, data-driven function. This holistic shift delivered measurable improvements across operations, supplier engagement, and cross-departmental influence.
Procurement Process Improvements
- 36% Reduction in Cycle Time: Enabled the team to reallocate efforts to higher-value initiatives.
- >10% Identified Savings and 6% Awarded Savings: Driving real financial impact through competitive sourcing.
Supplier Ecosystem Enhancements
- >42% of Supplier Interactions via Fairmarkit: Boosted transparency and supplier competition.
- Increased Sourcing Volume: Year-over-year growth in managed spend and event frequency.
Innovative Use Cases with Tangible Results
- CPR/AED Training RFP: Leveraged competitive bidding to achieve a 50% cost reduction.
- Management of Entirely New Categories: Achieved >16% savings in areas like gym equipment, where they didn’t have a preexisting vendor base.
These transformative outcomes have elevated procurement’s reputation across the business. The team is now viewed as a more strategic and data-driven partner. Fairmarkit also helped streamline their supplier base, improving data integrity and boosting response rates.
Looking Ahead
With foundational success in place, the organization is expanding its Fairmarkit usage to drive even more strategic value:
- Requester Intake: Launching the KIT intake tool to streamline sourcing requests and improve internal alignment
- Scaling RFPs: Expanding into more complex and competitive sourcing categories
- Team Growth: Onboarding new users to broaden adoption across functions
Future goals include significantly increasing awarded savings, deepening cross-functional collaboration, and further positioning procurement as a proactive business advisor. As part of a global organization, there is also interest in exploring ways to extend Fairmarkit’s impact beyond North America.
