This is what we would actually do, in what order, and what it costs.
No discovery call is required to see the number.
What we would go looking for
These are patterns that recur in transport and fleet, written as things to
look for. They are not findings from a named engagement.
Utilization measured on vehicles available rather than vehicles earning, so idle assets look like capacity.
Reactive maintenance displacing planned maintenance, raising both cost and downtime, reported as a maintenance budget overrun rather than a scheduling failure.
Lease renewals rolling automatically on terms set when the fleet profile was different.
Fuel and energy procurement on a card scheme with rebates nobody reconciles.
Incident and damage cost visible in insurance premium long after the behavior that caused it could have been addressed.
The sequence
Five weeks for one operating unit. More units run in parallel rather than in
series, so a group does not take five times as long.
Week 1
Intake and reconciliation7 requests written for transport and fleet, alongside the 107 covering the operating spine. We tell you which findings the gaps will limit before any fieldwork starts.
Weeks 2–3
Full pass, not a sampleEvery load in scope is read rather than sampled.
Week 4
Quantification and challengeEach finding sized, and put to whoever owns it before it is written down.
Week 5
Report and walkthroughThe written report, ranked by annual value and by how hard each finding is to act on.
3 core requests written for transport and fleet, inside the full intake.
Anything you do not have can be skipped with a reason — skipping narrows what the
review can conclude, and we tell you where before the work starts rather than after.
Fleet register — Owned, leased, age, utilization.
Cost per mile or per journey — Fuel, maintenance, driver, overhead.
Vehicle and driver utilization — Including empty running and idle time.
If any of this is already happening
The review is always worth doing and rarely urgent. It becomes urgent when
something else is happening — and if one of these is, the sequence above compresses
to fit it.
An insurance renewal after a claim or a CSA score change
A customer contract renewal without a defensible cost per mile
A DOT audit or a compliance review
Fuel or driver pay moving faster than contracted rate escalators
A misclassification claim from a contractor driver
Who needs to be in the room
Signs it: Owner, president or CFO
Will resist it: Dispatch and operations, whose lane and route economics become visible — worth telling them what the
review is for before they hear it from somewhere else.
Has been asking for it: Safety and compliance, who have been asking for the maintenance data
What it costs
Priced by operating unit — an entity, a location, or a business the accounts are
kept separately for. The second unit costs less than the first because by then the
intake is built, the chart of accounts is understood and the patterns are known.
Purchase order is the primary route — most
buyers this size raise a PO and pay against an invoice on terms. Card and bank
transfer exist for those who prefer them.