220 carriers on the roster, only 90 actively managed: cleaning up a forwarder's carrier network
An audit of the carrier base and client rates found the company was only really working with a fraction of its registered network, while rates for 30% of its client portfolio hadn't been updated in years. Segmenting carriers and renegotiating the price list restored control over margin.
Time to first result: 4 months
Context
The freight forwarder has operated for over a decade, mainly running Poland–Germany routes for 85 clients. Over that time it built a roster of 220 partner carriers, but never systematically reviewed it for quality, reliability, or price.
Challenge
Management noticed that despite stable order volume, forwarding margin wasn't growing, and some client rates looked out of date. Without a systematic review, the company didn't know how many carriers were actually generating value versus just cluttering the roster, or which client contracts urgently needed renegotiation.
What we found
The review found that of 220 carriers on the roster, only 90 were used regularly (at least once a month); the rest generated administrative overhead without real value. At the same time, rates for 30% of the client portfolio hadn't been renegotiated in 2–3 years despite rising fuel and driver labor costs, meaning real margin erosion on those orders.
What we proposed
Grevo scored the carrier base on quality, reliability, and price, isolating a group of key partners for continued work and volume-rate renegotiation. In parallel, Grevo updated the price list for clients billed at outdated rates, basing the new offer on current transport costs.
Implementation
Segmenting carriers and renegotiating with the top 30 took six weeks. Updating pricing for clients on outdated rates was rolled out in stages, as cooperation renewal dates approached, over the following three months.
Result
Renegotiating rates with key carriers cut transport purchasing costs by about 1.8%. Updating pricing for clients on outdated rates raised margin on the affected orders by 1–2 percentage points. Combined, the changes improved forwarding margin by more than 3 percentage points within four months of the audit's start.
„We had over two hundred carriers on our roster and thought that was our strength. The audit showed we were really only working with less than half of them. The rest was just noise making things harder to manage.”
— Managing Director, freight forwarding company
Services used
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