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 from whichever acquisition had signed it, and margin had thinned for eight consecutive quarters while the top line kept rising.
The board's instinct was a cost programme. The harder question was structural, and it was this: could a business assembled from acquisitions run as one network without losing the customer relationships that each of those acquisitions had brought with it? 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 that one. Cross-network decisions took a median 34 days to resolve, because no single person owned them and each one had to be negotiated across three management teams that had until recently run separate companies.
The in-flight initiatives were scored against the Transformation Load Map. Eleven were stopped. Most of them were sound ideas that the organisation simply could not carry at the same time as everything else, and saying that to the people who had sponsored them was the hardest week of phase one. Stopping them funded the three commitments that mattered.
How Markham helped
We drew one operating model across three phases. Unify network planning, rebuild pricing architecture, then stand up a single control tower. Each phase held three commitments or fewer, each priced against a verified baseline, and no phase was released until the one before it had locked in, which is slower than a client wants and the only sequence we have seen hold under a network this fragmented.
We held the programme architecture and delivery oversight. HolisticAutomation built the planning platform and control-tower systems. The weekly cadence reviewed outcomes rather than activity, and that is what made the two mid-programme failures cheap. Both commitments failed their load test at week three. Re-sequencing them there cost a fraction of what the same correction would have cost at month six, once the platform work had been built on top of them.
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. We would rather argue with a client about the stop list than about the roadmap.
Pricing architecture carried the largest share of value, not network design. Instinct would have sequenced it last. We now price the pricing question first, though we hold that more confidently for this network than we would for anyone else’s.
The weekly outcome cadence caught two failing commitments at week three instead of month six. A review rhythm costs very little and it is what makes early failure survivable.