The quoted rate and the paid rate are different numbers.
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 warehousing and logistics, written as things to
look for. They are not findings from a named engagement.
Accessorial charges — detention, demurrage, fuel surcharge, redelivery, liftgate — accumulating outside the negotiated rate and rarely reconciled back to it.
Empty running and unfilled backhaul treated as a fact of the network rather than a cost with an owner.
Storage billed on racked positions that are substantially air, because the pallet profile changed and the racking did not.
Agency labor premium normalized into the run rate after a peak that ended two years ago.
Third-party logistics contracts with minimum volume commitments that are no longer met, and shortfall charges nobody has modeled.
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 reconciliation9 requests written for warehousing and logistics, 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 client account 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 warehousing and logistics, 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.
Volumes by site, lane and month — Inbound, outbound, units and weight.
Cost per unit handled and per order shipped — By site.
Freight spend by carrier and lane — With accessorial charges broken out. Accessorials are where quoted rates and paid rates part company.
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.
A client contract renewal without a cost-to-serve model to negotiate from
An energy cost step change in a cold chain operation
A WMS migration, which exposes every unbilled activity at once
A major client onboarding whose profile does not match the pricing assumption
An acquisition, where per-client contribution margin is the first request
Who needs to be in the room
Signs it: Owner, president or CFO
Will resist it: Operations managers whose site-level cost becomes comparable — worth telling them what the
review is for before they hear it from somewhere else.
Has been asking for it: The commercial lead, who suspects which accounts lose money
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.