A route-level profitability diagnostic — built for the customer conversation. The output is not a cost report. It is a ranked view of every supply chain route you run, showing exactly where margin is leaking and what to do about it.
Standard reporting shows revenue and cost of goods. It does not show what it costs to serve a specific customer through a specific route — the freight, the handling, the service requirements, the commercial deductions, the returns. Those costs are real, but they sit in averages or in supplier contracts where nobody can see them. Somewhere between 20% and 40% of customers are typically unprofitable, and most businesses cannot say which ones.
The Cost-to-Serve Diagnostic closes that gap. It assigns every cost to the place it is actually incurred, traces each route end to end, and ranks them by what they genuinely contribute. Where a cost is buried inside a contract rather than measured, the model captures it as a directional allocation and says so — because a visible estimate is worth more than an exact number nobody can find.
The modules run in sequence. Commercial context establishes what the business currently sees. Cost architecture builds the picture layer by layer. Commercial intelligence tests whether any of it changes a decision.
What the business currently sees — and what it does not. The baseline before any cost is measured.
Can the business see true net margin by customer, channel, or route below the gross margin line? Examines P&L structure, allocation method, and whether Finance and Supply Chain are working from the same numbers. Where they disagree is itself a finding.
Filling a 500-unit pallet order and a 3-unit emergency order do not cost the same. Maps order frequency, size distribution, exception handling, and the degree to which ordering behaviour creates cost that operations absorbs silently.
The analytical core. Five sub-modules build the cost picture in sequence — gate check first, then each layer.
Runs first, always. Assesses whether the underlying data is credible enough to use. Unreliable inputs are flagged, not excluded.
Outbound freight, DC handling, pick and pack, storage, last-mile delivery. The most visible cost layer — and only part of the picture.
Discounts, rebates, promotional spend, settlement terms. Sits in Finance and rarely reaches the supply chain view. Often flips a profitable account.
EDI, routing guides, custom labelling, vendor chargebacks, account management time. The cost of how a customer demands to be served.
Return rate by customer and channel, reverse freight, processing, write-off, credit administration. Usually pooled — so the accounts causing it never carry it.
The decision layer. Knowing your cost-to-serve is worth nothing if it does not change what you do.
Which accounts belong in a premium tier, which in standard service, and which need a restructuring conversation.
Where current prices fail to cover the true cost of service — and where the business is quietly subsidizing loss-making accounts.
Which channels are structurally profitable. Whether e-commerce justifies its return rate, or the distributor tier its rebate structure.
Walking into the annual review knowing your true cost-to-serve. You know precisely which terms must change, and by how much.
Contract layer — Costs that arrive as a bundled fee — 3PL management contracts, freight embedded in a supplier's product price, pooled shared services — are captured separately, allocated by throughput volume, and flagged as directional throughout the output. Most cost-to-serve models miss this layer entirely. It is routinely 30–40% of the true cost.
A supply chain is not a list of customers. It is a network of routes. Every route through that network is a leg — and legs behave very differently from one another, even when the product is identical.
Every route in the network, ranked by what it actually contributes. Switch the unit of measure to reframe the numbers for whoever is in the room. Outlier flags fire automatically when a node or customer metric runs beyond 1.5× the network average.
Illustrative output — sample data, anonymized for demonstration. The real deliverable is built around your network, your numbers, and your customers.
Start with the questions. Deepen into the numbers. Then keep it current — because the value of a cost-to-serve picture compounds the moment there is a second quarter to compare it against.
The tiers are sequential, not alternatives. The free diagnostic frames the problem. The engagement builds the model and the data architecture behind it. The subscription is what turns a one-off analysis into an intelligence asset that gets more valuable every quarter it runs.
Not all cost-to-serve data exists. Knowing what is sitting in the ERP, what needs excavating, and what has to be constructed is how the engagement gets scoped honestly before day one.
This is not a prerequisite list. It is a map. Every engagement starts with the data integrity gate check, and the model is built to work with what exists — flagging clearly wherever a figure is directional rather than measured.
The diagnostic is designed for organizations with enough route and channel complexity that averages have stopped telling the truth — and where that blind spot is already costing money.
Many customers, many routes, many prices.
Where the gap between what you invoice and what you actually net is never visible per account, and route design has grown by accretion rather than decision.
High SKU count, promotional complexity, multi-tier distribution.
Where return rates and service requirements vary enormously by customer, but cost allocation flattens all of it into one blended average.
Contracted carriers, third-party warehousing, embedded freight.
Where product moves through 3PLs and bundled contracts, and the true cost per route is almost always understated because nobody can see inside the invoice.
“The conversation isn’t about which customers are big. It’s about which ones are worth what you’re spending to serve them.”
— Wildernet Strategic Consultancy