Diagnostics
Originally published in SupplyChainBrain
Somewhere between the dock and the invoice, a percentage of your revenue quietly disappears. Most supply chain leaders assume that’s finance’s problem to solve, but a better approach is to take a hard look at your operations data first.
While tariff volatility squeezes margins and labor and input costs keep climbing, cash flow has become one of the few levers companies can still control. Yet many have leaks they never thought to look for — in the operational systems that run their networks, long before finance ever creates an invoice.
Supply chain revenue comes from a stream of events across the fulfillment lifecycle, including mileage and accessorials in transportation, storage and handling fees in the warehouse, pick-and-pack charges in fulfillment, detention and demurrage at the yard or port, and usage-based fees on shared logistics platforms.
Each of those events originates in an operational system such as a TMS, WMS, or yard or dock management platform. A good example is a trailer that sits in the yard past its free time. That’s a billable detention event. But if the yard system isn’t connected to billing, the charge might never reach an invoice. Nobody made an error, and nothing looks broken, but the revenue never showed up.
This is why leakage is so hard to spot. Missed events don’t generate exceptions, disputes, or alerts. The work was done, the margin was spent, and the money was never billed.
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