Industries

Logistics & Supply Chain

In logistics the revenue is agreed at the start and the margin is decided afterwards, by demurrage, detention, deadheading and the documents that arrive late. Operators who can see a job’s true cost while it is still running are working from different information to those who find out at invoicing.

The situation

What we usually find

For transporters, clearing and forwarding agents and third-party logistics operators working the regional corridors.

A single consignment generates more documents than any other transaction in ordinary commerce, and each one is a point at which a cost can attach without anyone recording it. Storage that ran two days over. A container returned late. A trip repositioned empty because nothing was booked back. The rate was fixed weeks ago; every one of these events comes out of the margin, and most are captured after the invoice has gone out.

Regional operations are digitising fast and on a fixed timetable. Since 1 July 2026 transit goods licences and customs-controlled vehicle licences are issued through the Regional Electronic Cargo Tracking System integrated with iCMS; manually issued licences stay valid only to 31 December 2026. Cargo moves under electronic seals, through smart gates with number-plate recognition, tracked in real time across the Northern Corridor.

That is a considerable amount of accurate operational data being generated about your business by somebody else’s system. Operators whose own records cannot be reconciled to it are at a disadvantage in every dispute they enter.

How the work flows

Where the pressure points are

Every business in this sector runs a version of this cycle. These are the points where it strains when the systems behind it do not join up — and where the value of joining them up shows first.

The Booking to settlement cycle, and where it strains without joined-up systems. Quote: Rates set from an average cost per trip rather than the cost of this trip on this lane. Move: Trip events recorded in drivers’ messages, tracking systems and nobody’s ledger. Clear: Customs and corridor documents handled outside the system that has to invoice from them. Invoice: Accessorial charges discovered after billing, then written off rather than argued. Settle: Job profitability known weeks late, by which time the next job is priced the same way.

Where we'd start

The first move

We would take twenty completed jobs and rebuild the true margin on each, including every charge that attached after invoicing. The distribution of that result is usually the whole argument: it is rarely a uniform squeeze, and the lanes losing money are rarely the ones anyone suspected.

Where we are not the answer

We are not a transport management or fleet telematics vendor. We do not supply tracking hardware, and we do not replace RECTS, iCMS or your existing TMS — those are systems of record you integrate with, not systems you choose. Our work is the costing, documentation and settlement layer that sits between them and your accounts.

Is this how your operation runs?

Tell us where it strains, and we will tell you plainly which of this is relevant to you and which of it is not — before you commit to anything.

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