A third-party logistics operator with six sites in two countries, grown by acquisition over four years. Revenue growing at 20% a year; margin flat. Time horizon: eleven months.
The diagnosis
The client's stated problem was reporting: four warehouse systems could not be consolidated into one view. The diagnosis found something else. Each acquired site had kept its own definition of a completed job, so the numbers were not merely scattered — they were incomparable.
On the floor, three of the six sites were double-handling inbound freight because the receiving process assumed a layout that had changed two years earlier. Nobody had told the system, and the system had never told anyone.
The transformation
We standardised the operating definitions first — job, completion, exception, cost accrual — across all six sites, with the site managers in the room. That took seven weeks and no software.
Then we consolidated onto a single platform with a common receiving process, re-slotted two sites, and rebuilt the cost accrual so a job's cost was known at completion rather than at month-end. Change management ran as its own workstream with a named owner at each site.
The software consolidation was the easy half. Agreeing what a finished job is took longer and mattered more.
What we learned
We underestimated how much authority site managers needed to give up, and we sequenced that conversation too late. On a repeat engagement we would run the definitions workshop in week one, before any platform discussion, and we would ask the CEO to be in the room for it.
We would also budget more for data cleansing. The migration was clean; the eleven years of history behind it were not.