Anyone can find savings in a rate card. We took one year of a UK operator's subcontracted haulage and tightened the constraints until the number was one you could take to a board.
Thousands of trips a year are subcontracted to third-party hauliers, chosen by planners against the rates held in the planning system. This diagnostic examined one regional depot's subcontracted outbound work across a full year.
The work described here is a Flow Dynamics diagnostic: a fixed-scope engagement that takes a slice of the operator's own historical data and answers one commercially significant question with evidence rather than opinion.
The operator is anonymised. Every figure on this page comes directly from the diagnostic notebook run against their transport management system. Nothing has been adjusted for presentation.
"Are we paying the right hauliers the right rates?"
One year of subcontracting was pulled from the TMS: 5,027 trips, £1,853,067 paid. Every trip was re-priced against every haulier rate the planning system held for that lane. The cheapest-compliant total came to £940,527, a gap of £912,540, or 49.24% of spend.
If that number were real it would be the easiest money in logistics. It is not real. Knowing why, and what survives once you find out, is the actual diagnostic.
Two things were hiding inside the headline. The planning system's loose lane mappings offered hauliers that were never genuine options for the work. And a bias check on the choices themselves showed the planners were more rational than the raw model implied.
What looked like favouritism was mostly missing constraints. Once the real rules were in the model, price explained nine tenths of every choice. The planning was not irrational. The data describing it was incomplete, and so was the headline saving.
Twelve months of subcontracted trips, haulier vouchers and rate cards pulled directly from the operator's TMS. No new systems, no integrations. The data already existed.
Every trip priced against every listed haulier: a 49.24% gap. Too large to be true, and traceable to catch-all lane mappings offering hauliers that could never have done the work. The first finding was a data-quality finding.
The same year re-priced against the depot's approved list only. The modelled saving fell to 10.98%, or £203,436. Closer to reality, still missing the operator's finer rules.
The operator's own haulier-to-lane mapping applied, and the bias check re-run. With 4,159 trips priced under the complete rule set, the defensible saving in haulier selection settled at 5.93%, or £93,940 for the year.
The unconstrained pass repeated across every depot: 6,742 trips, £2.59m of spend, and a 58.08% headline gap. A bigger surface, awaiting the same discounting, which tells the operator exactly where to point the next diagnostic.
Each pass strips out savings the operator could never have captured. What remains is small by headline standards and large by the standards of money you can actually bank.
| Pass | Constraints applied | Trips priced | Modelled saving | Of spend |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 · Headline | Every haulier the system listed | 5,027 | £912,540 | 49.24% |
| 2 · Approved list | The depot's approved hauliers | 5,027 | £203,436 | 10.98% |
| 3 · Full mapping | The operator's haulier-to-lane rules | 4,159 | £93,940 | 5.93% |
£93,940 a year, at one depot, in haulier selection alone. Not the £912,540 the naive model promised. The smaller number is the one that survives scrutiny, and it repeats across every depot in the network.
This is a model run on historical data, and we'd rather you read it that way than as a promise.
A Flow Dynamics diagnostic runs this analysis on your data, on your infrastructure. Nothing leaves your estate. Fixed fee, fixed scope, invoiced on completion. You end up with evidence, not a sales deck.
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