How a $1.2bn services group put 15 transport carriers under continuous control

A services group with $1.2bn in revenue runs freight through fifteen carriers - each with its own grids, fuel surcharges and indexation clauses, and an invoice flow far too dense for spot checks. Freight has a property that makes everything worse: part of the cost is re-invoiced to the group’s own customers, so a mispriced line erodes a resale margin.

What Fakto did

Fakto put the carrier mix under a continuous reconciliation layer: the expected price of every shipment independently recalculated from the contractual grids, compared to the invoiced price down to the cent, and each shipment benchmarked across all available carriers. Deployment started on a pilot perimeter, then scaled to the full perimeter. To date: 250,000 shipments reconciled across the fifteen carriers, more than 40,000 invoices and pricing grids processed, and 2% of shipments flagged as sub-optimally routed.

What Fakto found

The headline number: 4% overbilling identified across the carrier mix. The more useful result is its decomposition - the same line-by-line reconciliation surfaced five distinct value pools, each with its own mechanism and its own route to action.

Contractual error - overcharges with no basis in the signed schedule: non-contractual surcharges, wrong weight bracket, diesel-index drift. Recoverable by direct dispute with the carrier.

Operational - avoidable costs rooted in internal practices: weight rounding, abnormal return rates, labelling non-compliance, lost parcels never claimed. Addressable through operational action and claims.

Scenario optimisation - savings at constant service and volume, by reallocating flows to the cheapest carrier at equal lead time, destination and weight.

Governance - contract integrity and lifecycle: expired contracts renewed without renegotiation, increases above the reference index (CNR), index drift, service commitments not honoured.

Resale margin - protecting the customer-facing margin: lines resold at or below cost, gaps to the market margin benchmark, costs never re-invoiced.

The instructive point is the distribution. Only one of the five pools is “billing error” in the classic sense. The other four - operational practice, flow arbitrage, contract governance, resale margin - involve no supplier dispute at all, and no recovery audit looks for them. Yet they fall out of the same reconciliation: once every shipment is recomputed against its grid and benchmarked against the alternatives, all five readings are the same work.

The fifteen carriers remain under that control - every shipment, every cycle. What used to be a dense blind spot is now a ledger: five pools, each with an owner, a route to action, and a number.