The story
For years the freight invoices had arrived on schedule, been approved on schedule and been paid on schedule. The rate had not moved in any way anyone could remember, and that was exactly the problem. Inside the client's finance team the number carried a certain weight: high enough to raise an eyebrow whenever someone looked at it afresh, but never so obviously wrong that anyone had felt able to push back.
The business depended on surface logistics to function. Freight was not a line item to be trimmed at the margins; it was part of how the product reached the customer. That made the question harder, not easier. Challenge the incumbent vendor without evidence and the risk was a strained relationship on a route the company could not afford to disrupt. Say nothing and the suspicion would keep compounding, one invoice at a time.
What the client lacked was not a suspicion but a benchmark. Every internal conversation ended in the same place: the rate felt high, but compared with what? The vendor's own quotations were the only reference point the company held, and a vendor's quote is not a market.
Leadership wanted a straight answer to two questions. Were they being overcharged, and if so, by how much? They did not want an audit of their own invoices. They wanted to know what the market would actually charge for the same route and the same volume, gathered in a way the incumbent would never hear about. That was the brief they brought to NARADism.
How we approached it
- 1
Fixed the benchmark
The exact freight route and volume the client was paying for were pinned down, so that every quotation gathered would be a like-for-like comparison rather than an approximation.
- 2
Approached the market as a customer
Posing as a prospective corporate customer, the team quietly approached logistics vendors of every size, national players and regional operators alike, requesting competitive quotations for the same route and volume.
- 3
Collected formal quotations
Formal quotes were gathered from multiple vendors, each recorded against the same specification.
- 4
Filled in the informal picture
Discreet calls captured the informal market chatter that formal quotations never show.
- 5
Triangulated and reported
Formal and informal figures were cross-referenced and presented as an evidence-backed benchmark the client could put on the negotiating table.
The client's rate sat well above what genuine market competition would bear. Established vendors quoted far lower for the identical route and volume, and the gap was not a rounding difference: it ran into a steep, hard-to-justify premium over the market, in the region of 60–200%.
Set against those quotations, the potential saving on the same freight was in the order of 40–65%.
Armed with an evidence-backed benchmark, the client walked into vendor renegotiations from a position of strength. A vague suspicion that had circulated for years became a concrete, recurring cost saving.
Illustrative composite built from sector-typical fact patterns encountered in practice. Names, figures and timelines are indicative; no client is identifiable.