Cutting delivery costs by 22% without slowing down

The challenge

Northwind had grown from one city to four in just three years. The trucks were full and the phones kept ringing, but every new route seemed to cost more than the last one. Fuel, overtime and failed deliveries were quietly eating the margin that growth was supposed to bring.

The leadership team had tried the obvious fixes: a new routing tool, tighter delivery windows, a bonus for on-time drivers. Each one helped for a few weeks and then created a new problem somewhere else. Nobody could say with confidence what a single delivery actually cost.

Our approach

We started on the dock, not in the boardroom. For two weeks we rode along with drivers, sat with dispatchers and followed parcels from the moment they arrived to the moment they reached a customer.

What we did:

• Mapped every step from dock to doorstep and put a real cost on each one

• Found that 40% of failed deliveries came from just six postcodes and two time slots

• Rebuilt route planning around delivery density instead of driver habits

• Gave every depot manager a one-page daily dashboard with four numbers

• Tested each change in one depot before rolling it out to the others

  
  

The dashboard changed the morning meeting. Instead of arguing about what went wrong yesterday, we talk about the two things we will fix today.

Jordan Price, Depot Manager, Northwind Logistics

The result

Within nine months, the cost per delivery fell by 22%. On-time delivery rose from 88% to 97%, and failed first attempts dropped by more than half. Drivers now finish their routes earlier, and overtime is down across all four cities.

Just as important, the team runs the new way of working on its own. When Northwind opened its fifth city last spring, the depot managers set it up using the same playbook, without calling us.