A supply chain review in this practice is a reading of what you pay, why you pay it, and which changes are worth the disruption. It is not a rate shopping exercise. Rate shopping without a baseline produces a concession on the base rate and a recovery in accessorials, fuel, peak, minimums and storage. You feel better in month one. You cannot explain month seven.
What we actually examine
Door-to-door landed cost by lane, not line-haul alone. 3PL and carrier structures, including minimums, cubic rules and exception charges. Inventory position versus transport cost: air used as an apology for planning, road used because it is familiar, rail ignored because the booking process is harder. Process leakage: cut-offs, no-shows, redelivery, DC slot failure, containers that wait because nobody owned the ETA.
We rebuild the picture from invoices and volumes. We will not accept a supplier-prepared summary as the only source. If the invoice file cannot be produced, that is the first finding. A company that cannot see its own freight cost is not ready to retender. It is ready to be retendered against.
Leakage that looks like weather
Detention and storage are discussed as if they were climate. They are calendars. A box that cannot be received on the day it is released is a warehouse and transport problem, not an act of God. A peak surcharge that repeats every year is not a surprise. It is an unbudgeted habit. We put those habits next to the base rate so management can see which lever they are actually pulling.
What you receive
A baseline workbook you can defend in a board paper. A short list of changes ranked by saving and effort. A note on what should wait. If a tender is the right next step, we carry the work into supplier selection rather than dropping a PDF on procurement and walking away. If the right next step is to keep the incumbent and rewrite the SLA, we will write that, including the data you must start collecting.
We will not promise a percentage saving before we have seen the invoices. Operators have to run Monday. The paper has to be usable on Monday.
How the baseline is built
Twelve months is the usual window. Less than that hides seasonality. More than that is welcome if the files exist. We join invoices to dispatch or receipt volumes. We separate line-haul or ocean from fuel, waiting time, redelivery, storage, peak and minimums. We put missed slots next to detention days. We put air next to the planning miss that caused it. Cubic rules and dead-freight are treated as design choices, not as weather. If the 3PL cannot produce a volume extract you can use without their portal, that fact is recorded as a finding, not as an inconvenience.
Mode mix is examined as a habit. Road because it is familiar. Air because someone missed a cut-off. Coastal and rail ignored because the booking process is slower. A review that only ranks current suppliers on the current mode will miss the cheaper honest option. We will say when a mode change is real and when it is a slide. Real means the calendar, the packaging and the customer promise can absorb it. A slide means someone liked a diagram.
Savings that survive a board paper
A saving that depends on a heroic utilisation the plant has never hit is not a saving. A saving that depends on the supplier forgetting to invoice accessorials is not a saving. We rank changes by cash, risk and the number of people who have to change their Monday. Contract rewrite. Mode shift. Slot discipline. Tender. Inventory policy. Those are different efforts. Mixing them in a single percentage is how reviews get framed and then ignored.
When not to open this file
If you need a truck tomorrow, this is the wrong file. If you have already signed a new 3PL and want us to applaud, this is the wrong file. If you want us to fill a warehouse we own, we do not own one. Open this file when you can produce twelve months of invoices and you are prepared to hear that some of the cost is yours, not the carrier's.