ISM World 2026 brought procurement leaders to Colorado with a shared reality. Supply chain shocks, inflation, and shifting workforces have fundamentally changed the job. The mandate has expanded from simple cost reduction to enterprise-wide impact, but direct control has shrunk.
At ISM World, Motus led two speaking sessions to address this exact tension. In “From Contracts to Control Systems: Procurement’s Next Operating Model,” Motus CEO Phong Nguyen and Director of Fleet Jake Ernest explored how traditional procurement models are breaking under modern demands. In our joint session with Element Fleet Management, “Optimizing Employee Driving Programs: Designing Programs for Employees in Motion,” Ernest and Toza Crnilovic, VP of Strategic Partnerships at Element, mapped out how to solve these challenges operationally.
Across both sessions, a consistent theme surfaced in conversations with procurement leaders onsite: the old model of managing vendors and contracts is no longer enough. The companies winning at employee driving are not managing better programs. They are building better systems.
Procurement is doing more with less control
The traditional procurement model was built for predictability, centralized control, and periodic review cycles. That environment no longer exists.
Today, 87% of organizations report increasing maverick spend. Despite taking on more strategic responsibility, procurement only provides full, end-to-end support across about 45% of spend categories. The gap between responsibility and control is widening.
The fastest-growing categories of spend are distributed across teams and budgets. They are material in cost and risk, but they are poorly aligned to traditional procurement models. The fastest moving spend is the least visible. If you cannot see where the money is going in real time, you cannot govern it.
Employee driving is a system, not a line item
Look at how organizations historically handled their drivers. The model used to be simple. You provided company cars. Over time, companies shifted to flat allowances, and eventually to expense reimbursements in an attempt to empower employees and shift assets off the balance sheet.
The result is a fragmented reality. Employee driving is not a single program you can negotiate and lock down. It is a dynamic system where cost, risk, productivity, policy, and the employee experience are entirely connected. When one element changes, everything else moves.
You cannot manage a dynamic system with static contracts. Control does not end with what you buy. It extends into how it is used.
How to move from fragmented programs to a connected system
Fixing a fragmented system requires more than writing a stricter policy. It requires a connected architecture that can see, enforce, adapt, and improve in real time. Organizations making this shift follow a five-phase framework.
Visibility
You cannot manage what you cannot see. Fragmented data across different reimbursement methods leaves you without clear answers to basic questions about total miles, route efficiency, or actual driving costs. You end up making budget decisions based on blind spots. By unifying their data, a leading beverage company solved this problem directly. They brought $150 million in combined program spend into a single, comprehensive view.
Real-time controls
Policies define intent, but systems enforce reality. When you rely on manual compliance tracking, your risk exposure shifts daily. Unverified mileage and unchecked behaviors create quiet, compounding financial leaks. By embedding rules directly into a system, enforcement happens automatically. A global medtech company proved the impact of this continuous oversight. They saved $1 million simply by increasing their GPS adoption by one percent.
Adaptability
One-size-fits-all approaches fail in dynamic environments. Different roles carry fundamentally different cost and risk profiles. A flat structure overpays some drivers while under-supporting others. Adaptability means designing systems that fit how people actually work. When Hologic aligned their fragmented programs to match actual workforce usage patterns, they achieved a 25% reduction in administrative burden.
Integration
Separate systems create separate silos. You do not fix fragmentation by optimizing individual programs. You fix it by connecting them into a single workflow. Manual data entry and disconnected approvals drain productivity across procurement, finance, and human resources. When Key Energy integrated their systems, they eliminated these manual workflows and saved 800 hours annually. Time is a resource you can reclaim.
Continuous optimization
Control is just the baseline. Once your systems are connected, data reveals inefficiencies that were previously invisible. Annual reviews tell you what was true once. Continuous monitoring lets you improve performance every day. Atlanta Beverage used this continuous approach to estimate $5 million in savings when transitioning away from company cars to a modern employee driving program.
Three questions for your team
As you evaluate your own procurement operating model, start with the realities on the ground.
- Do you have a single view of total driving cost across your organization?
- Can you confidently say where your biggest risk sits today?
- Are your programs designed around real behavior or legacy assumptions?
The hardest problems today come from categories that behave like interconnected systems. Connect with Motus to talk through what a connected employee driving system could look like for your organization.
