Price and service win orders. Execution decides what they are worth

Most builders’ merchants can tell you their gross margin on a product down to the penny. Far fewer can tell you the true cost of delivering it.

Once a delivery date is agreed and the phone is put down, the margin you fought for is no longer shaped by the sale. It is shaped by what happens next. By the manual effort it takes to make the schedule hold together, the follow-up calls, the re-shuffling of loads, and the trucks leaving half-empty because the plan could not flex in time.

This work is rarely visible on a P&L. Transport is usually tracked as a lump sum of vehicles, fuel, wages, and maintenance. But every transport decision is made at order, route, and customer level and that aggregate number hides the truth. It doesn't show you the cost of a specific route decision. It doesn't show you where you are leaking money on a per-order basis.

The cost of complexity

This manual way of working functions fine until it doesn't. As volumes grow or customer expectations increase, complexity scales faster than teams do. What feels manageable at ten drops becomes fragile at twenty.

That is when the familiar patterns start. Sales teams spend the morning chasing deliveries instead of preventing calls. Planners react to the day instead of improving the next one. And margin is quietly eroded, one transport decision at a time.

From guesswork to visibility

We explored this specific tension in our recent webinar on AI bulk route optimisation. The conversation wasn't really about AI. It was about what happens when planning becomes visible.

When you move from manual coordination to a system that can handle complexity, guesswork starts to disappear. One merchant noted that, for the first time, they could answer a simple but critical question: “How do we take this last-minute order without losing the margin?”

Instead of relying on gut feel, they could see the impact. They could see which trucks were active, where the capacity lay, and whether squeezing in that extra drop would break the day's promises or protect the margin.

Measuring the reality

This isn't just theory. We recently published a case study with NP Nilsson that highlights this exact shift.

Before they digitised their operations, their financial view of transport was limited to those aggregate costs. Their former CFO often said his biggest wish was simply to track freight costs accurately at the order level.

Now, they can. The cost of transport is visible per order, not just spread across branches. Routes are visualised and adjusted in real time. The planning that used to require a chain of phone calls "where are you, what have you dropped" is now managed instantly.

Transport became measurable, which made it manageable.

The bottom line

In a market where growth is forecast to be modest, you cannot rely on volume to cover operational slack. You cannot chase marginal volume if you don't know the cost of delivering it.

The conversation the industry is having is about how to survive a marginal growth year. The conversation worth having is do we know where we're making money and where we're giving it away?

Price and service might win the order. But execution decides what they are worth.