Customer-Driven Procurement
In safety and traffic control, procurement teams are often asked to move fast while navigating rising costs, supply chain uncertainty, and increasing pressure to deliver stronger insights and better decisions. That environment makes it even more important to move beyond a purely tactical purchasing mindset. AWP Safety approaches procurement as a strategic, cross-functional discipline focused on continuous improvement, operational efficiency, and creating better outcomes for customers.
Key Takeaways
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- The best traffic control partners use cross-functional input to make sourcing decisions that support safer, more reliable service.
- Strong procurement practices can improve traffic control crew responsiveness, helping utilities mobilize equipment and solutions quickly when project needs change.
- Supplier decisions should balance cost with quality, standardization, maintenance efficiency, and long-term performance.
- Data, forecasting, and supplier performance metrics can help utility customers plan ahead, adapt to disruptions, and deliver more consistent results.
Q: Dwayne, what’s your background? How is it helping shape AWP Safety’s approach to procurement?
I’ve been in procurement for 30 years. In that time, I’ve gained experience in sourcing, purchasing, supply chain, and materials management for large manufacturing companies. The manufacturing industry is very advanced in its procurement strategies, and many of those best practices are transferable to industries like safety.
At AWP Safety, we look holistically at our procurement ecosystem, leveraging data and vendor partnerships across the enterprise to streamline our supply chain in ways that help us operate more efficiently and deliver outstanding customer service. It’s my goal to make AWP Safety the safety industry’s gold standard in procurement.
Q: How do customers drive your procurement strategy?
We always want to say “yes” to our customers and deliver quickly on what they need. Through our procurement strategy, we’re achieving an integrated supply chain that is seamlessly connected and ready to serve customers at a moment’s notice. For example, customer Texas A&M Transportation Institute (TTI) is supporting a 10-year roadway Texas Department of Transportation (TXDOT) reconstruction project by completing a major traffic and road conditions survey. The survey work bubbled up quickly, and because of our supply chain, we were able to deliver a high-quality Intelligent Traffic System (ITS) within 24 hours of TTI’s request. The ITS includes 18 automated messages boards that support a complex end-of-queue warning system to elevate driver safety.
We also want to make smart, efficient supplier decisions that ultimately benefit our customers. Procurement teams that work in silos can make an impact, but that impact will be limited. Our approach is to leverage cross-functional teamwork – from our executive team to finance to our partners in Environmental, Health and Safety – to make supplier decisions that improve the level of quality and speed we provide for every customer.
Q: How does procurement strategy improve quality?
We hold our suppliers to an extremely high standard. We don’t just look at price; we insist on quality and performance excellence and will adjust our list of suppliers if it means we can achieve a higher level of product quality or access more advanced safety technology. One example is automated flagger assistance devices (AFADs). We’re currently transitioning to a supplier with an AFAD offering that affords more opportunities to standardize our equipment and better manage maintenance on the units. These are benefits that translate to worksite efficiency and shorter lead times for customers.
Q: Do you collect and use data to make these decisions?
Absolutely. Data helps us forecast what our customers need and when they need it. The safety industry can be unpredictable sometimes – one major hurricane can disrupt the normal flow of utility work for weeks. But there are historical trends we use to make data-driven decisions for better planning. And we track equipment performance to ensure it’s living up to the claims and our customers’ expectations.
We also leverage key performance indicators (KPIs) to understand if our suppliers are hitting benchmarks or improving year over year. It’s been a game changer.
Q: As procurement and supply chain teams face rising costs and pressure to do more, where do you see the biggest opportunities to improve performance?
Moving beyond a quarter-to-quarter mindset and thinking more commercially about how procurement helps the business perform over time.
For us, that means actively engaging supplier partners and looking for improvement opportunities across areas like renegotiation, consolidation, specification review, process optimization, and logistics. It also means challenging the “why,” not just the “what,” so we can better understand the need behind a purchase and identify smarter solutions.
Cross-functional collaboration is also critical. Procurement creates more value when it is embedded in decisions early instead of being brought in at the end as a tactical step. That gives teams the ability to ask better questions, improve alignment, and contribute more strategically.
There are also a few practical areas where companies can act quickly: reviewing tail spend, auditing excess “just-in case” inventory, and inviting supplier-led innovation that can reduce costs without sacrificing quality. In many cases, meaningful results come from small, consistent improvements that add up over time.
Q: What’s the future of AWP Safety’s supply chain look like?
In a word, seamless. I often reference an image of figures linked arm-in-arm that represents AWP Safety, our suppliers, and our customers.
I envision a supply chain so well-connected that customers know that any solution they get from us will be of the highest quality, arrive at the
right time, and fit their budget. They know that we’ll be ready to rock and roll on whatever they need from us.
Learn more about ITS and other Smart Work Zone solutions mentioned in this article,
