To truly drive change and revolutionize his company’s supply chain, Brad Jenkins knew he was going to need help.
So, the senior vice president of supply and distribution at Pilot Flying J enlisted Pranjal Srivastava, Akhil Sehgal, and their team at enterprise business and technology consulting firm Sapient Consulting to help them transform the company’s supply chain from one that is cost-driven to one that is value-driven.
Before Srivastava and Sehgal could come up with a strategy to improve Pilot Flying J’s current processes, they had to identify its weaknesses. They consulted with Jenkins to discuss the state of Pilot Flying J’s supply chain and quickly identified the main issue with its operations.
“We had to get an integrated view of the supply chain and understand how each part of the business worked with the others,” Srivastava says. “The company had many different systems, spreadsheets, and used antiquated technology, which made keeping track of it all difficult.”
Once the team had identified the major point of Pilot Flying J’s supply chain operations, they began to implement a solution. The goal was to join the company’s disparate systems into one streamlined, easily accessible platform the business’ necessary stakeholders could use.
To execute this solution, the Sapient Consulting team used a tactic called the “game plan program,” a strategy that has two components: business modeling and execution. In the business modeling stage, Srivastava and Sehgal evaluated every aspect of Pilot Flying J’s business processes from front to back. This meant assessing everything from employee training, procurement, and the distribution process in various departments throughout the company.
Once they completed their evaluation, the duo developed five solutions for different areas of the company to transform Pilot Flying J’s supply chain: bulk sales, crude oil, crude trading, wholesale business, and retail business.
So far, Srivastava and Sehgal have helped roll out three of the five solutions to great success.
“For the first time, Pilot Flying J has a straight-through processing system for their bulk supply business, which helps them integrate their front office, main office, and back office into a single system,” Srivastava says. “It is now one system, which is much more coordinated and has led to better collaboration between teams.”
