Rebuilding a $220M logistics operating model
Audited under the Markham Verification Standard at month 18. Full audit trail available under NDA.
The situation
A family-owned contract logistics group had grown from $90M to $220M in six years, mostly by acquisition. Revenue scaled; the operating model did not. Three networks ran on three planning systems, pricing was inherited deal by deal, and margin had thinned for eight consecutive quarters.
The board's instinct was a cost programme. The harder question was structural: could a business assembled from acquisitions run as one network without losing the customer relationships each acquisition had brought? Sixteen improvement initiatives were already in flight. None was finished.
What the diagnostic found
A six-week diagnostic put numbers on the fragmentation. Routing overlap, duplicate fixed cost and inconsistent pricing were costing $11.4M of margin a year. A larger cost sat underneath: cross-network decisions took a median 34 days, because no one owned them.
The in-flight initiatives were scored against the Transformation Load Map. Eleven were stopped — not because they were bad ideas, but because the organisation could not carry them. Stopping them funded the three commitments that mattered.
How Markham helped
One operating model, reached in three drawn phases: unify network planning, rebuild pricing architecture, stand up a single control tower. Each phase held three commitments or fewer, each priced against a verified baseline, each released only when the previous phase had locked in.
Markham held the programme architecture and delivery oversight; HolisticAutomation built the planning platform and control-tower systems. A fixed weekly cadence reviewed outcomes, not activity. Two commitments failed their load test mid-programme and were re-sequenced — cheaply, because the review caught them at week three rather than month six.
Impact in detail
Baselines fixed and audited before phase one. No figure above is self-reported.
What we took from it
Stopping eleven initiatives created more capacity than any single initiative added. The stop list is the strategy.
Pricing architecture, not network design, carried the largest share of value — and instinct would have sequenced it last.
The weekly outcome cadence caught two failing commitments at week three instead of month six. Review rhythm is cheap insurance.