A mid-market freight operator running $380M in annual revenue across 23 terminals, 1,400 drivers, and a margin stack held together by tribal knowledge, email threads, and a finance team that spent more time reconciling than deciding.
The company had grown 4× in six years through acquisition. Every terminal brought its own spreadsheet, its own margin definition, and its own idea of what “on-time” meant. By the time I arrived, the CFO’s team was spending 11 hours per quote reconciling data across 14 sources before they could even begin pricing.
The CEO asked a simple question every Monday: “What is our gross margin this week?” Three people gave three different answers. The quarter closed before anyone agreed on the number.
11 hours average. Three analysts pulling from email, ERP exports, and a shared drive folder named “FINAL v3.”
3.5 hours. Single surface, pre-populated with live lane data and margin thresholds from the spine.
9 business days from close to board-ready P&L. Manual journal entries for inter-terminal transfers.
Half a day. Automated netting, one canonical gross-margin definition, exceptions surfaced by rule.
Three competing definitions across finance, ops, and sales. Board presentations footnoted with caveats.
One. Governed by a metric contract with ownership, refresh cadence, and exception routing.
Map every data source, every handoff, every definition disagreement. Name the pain in dollars.
One canonical definition of gross margin. Ownership, refresh cadence, and exception escalation path.
A data integration layer that replaces the 14 spreadsheets with one governed pipeline.
A quote-builder that pulls live lane data, margin thresholds, and capacity signals into one screen.
Runbooks, alerting, and a quarterly review cadence that keeps definitions from drifting.
“We stopped arguing about whose number was right — and started arguing about what to do.”
CFO, anonymized
Figures are representative composites based on real engagements. Client identity anonymized per NDA. Specific metrics available upon request in a confidential context.