Case Study: Trading and Distribution Company achieves route-level delivery costing and customer profitability insights with Blueocean Market Intelligence

Assigning transport and labor costs to routes and customers using activity-based costing

Trading and Distribution Company, a transportation firm, engaged Blueocean Market Intelligence to assign delivery and labor costs at the route and customer level and to calculate customer/route profitability so it could understand which routes and customers were most and least profitable. The challenge required an activity-based costing approach and route-level analytics to attribute costs accurately to individual sales transactions and delivery stops.

Blueocean Market Intelligence built a fixed-route model that used route-ship-to sequencing and travel-time data, merged with the client’s transactions, to assign routes and visit order and computed delivery time using four components (Travel Time + Processing/Delivery Time + Special Travel Time + Extra Delivery Time). As a result, Blueocean enabled the Trading and Distribution Company to assign costs by route and customer, rank customers by profit, identify loss-making customer categories and underperforming routes/days, pinpoint low-volume regions harming profitability, and target clients and route changes to increase revenue and reduce delivery time.