Transport Consultants
Transport is usually the largest single cost in your supply chain. It’s also the one that drifts furthest from optimal without anyone noticing.
Companies That Trust Us
Where Transport Costs Actually Leak
Most transport cost problems aren’t caused by one big mistake. They’re caused by small decisions that were right at the time and were never revisited.
A freight contract signed three years ago against volumes that have since changed shape. A fleet sized for a distribution pattern that no longer exists. Delivery routes planned around a customer base that has moved, grown, or started ordering twice as often in half the quantity.
None of those show up as a crisis. They show up as a cost line that creeps upward while everyone assumes someone else is watching it.
What makes transport particularly prone to this is that the decisions causing the drift are often made somewhere else. Sales win a national account and the fleet is suddenly running to a geography it was never sized for. Marketing shortens the delivery promise from three days to next day. Procurement consolidates suppliers and your inbound lanes change overnight.
Each of those was a sound decision made by people who weren’t thinking about transport, and none of them arrives with a note attached explaining what it will cost to deliver.
We work across three main areas, and most clients find their problem sits in one of them.
Freight Contracts and Negotiation
Your carriers negotiate contracts every day and you do it every few years, which is why the gap between what your contract promises and what you actually receive is usually worth 8 to 15%.
Fleet Management
How many vehicles you need, what type they should be, and whether you should own them at all: three questions your lessor and your 3PL both have strong opinions about, and neither of them is neutral.
Route Planning and Optimisation
Last mile is where cost per unit is highest and where growth hurts most, and buying routing software doesn’t fix it if nobody has set the parameters against how your operation actually runs.
Why the Three Work Together
Most clients arrive with one of these three in mind, and that’s usually the right place to start. But the biggest savings tend to sit where two of them meet.
Change your vehicle mix and you change what your routes can do. Consolidate deliveries and you change the volumes you take to a freight tender, which changes the rates you can negotiate. Fix the routing first and the fleet you need might be two vehicles smaller than the one you were about to renew.
Sequence matters more than most people expect. Renegotiating a contract before sorting out your order pattern locks in the wrong shape for another three years. We’ve seen businesses get more from sequencing two changes correctly than from doing either one well on its own.
It’s also why the answer is often smaller than the client feared. A business bracing for a fleet replacement finds it needs fewer vehicles rather than newer ones.
Chain of Responsibility
If you run heavy vehicles in Australia, transport decisions carry legal weight as well as commercial weight.
Scheduling that creates fatigue risk. Loading practices that lead to mass or dimension breaches. Contracts that impose delivery times a carrier can’t meet lawfully.
Under the Heavy Vehicle National Law, responsibility for these doesn’t stop with the driver. It runs up the chain to consignors, packers, loaders, schedulers and the directors above them.
Compliance belongs in a cost conversation because the changes that save money can quietly increase exposure. Tightening a route to fit in two more drops looks like an efficiency on a spreadsheet, and looks like something else entirely if it only works when the driver skips a rest break. Compliance is part of how we approach transport work generally, and we also run Chain of Responsibility audits as standalone engagements.
If you’re about to tighten routes, resize the fleet or renegotiate freight rates, it’s worth knowing what those changes do to your exposure before you commit to them.
Book a call and we’ll talk through where you sit.
Our Transport Credentials
Transport work is a core part of what we do rather than a sideline. We’ve been advising businesses on freight contracts, fleet composition and delivery routing for 29 years, across 26 countries, in sectors from FMCG and retail through to mining, pharmaceutical and government.
We have no affiliation with any carrier, 3PL, lessor or software vendor, and we take no commissions or referral fees. That independence is the point. When we tell you to keep your fleet, or to outsource it, or to stay with your current carrier, there’s nothing in it for us one way or the other.
It also means we’ll tell you when the answer is smaller than you expected. Not every transport problem needs a project, and we’d rather say so than sell you one.
It All Starts With a 15-Minute Call
If your transport costs are moving in the wrong direction and you’re not certain why, a short call is usually enough to point you in the right direction.
On that call we’ll typically:
- Look at what’s changed in your operation recently, because that’s usually where the answer is.
- Work out whether you’re dealing with a contract problem, an asset problem, or an execution problem.
- Give you two or three specific things to check when you get off the phone.
Worst case, you’ll know where to get started. Best case, we save you rather more than the cost of the call.
Where You’ve Seen Us
Let’s Talk About Your Transport Operation
Whether you’ve got a freight contract coming up for renewal, a fleet you suspect is the wrong shape, or delivery costs climbing faster than your order volumes, we’re happy to help.
Fill in the quick form to chat with a Logistics Bureau transport consultant.
You can also call us on +61 (2) 8212 9775 or contact us here.
Talk soon!
Rob O’Byrne
