Logistics attention in manufacturing follows a consistent pattern: outbound gets scrutinised because customers complain about it, and inbound gets ignored because suppliers absorb the visible pain. That’s usually backwards in terms of where money is available.

What First-mile Costs Actually Contain

Inbound freight is frequently bundled into supplier pricing, which means it’s invisible and unmanaged. If your terms are delivered-duty-paid across most of your supply base, you’re paying whatever freight your suppliers arrange, at whatever margin they add, with no visibility and no leverage.

The consolidation opportunity is usually large. Multiple suppliers in one region each shipping separately, on different days, in part-loads. Nobody sees the aggregate because each shipment sits on a different purchase order.

Receiving inefficiency adds more. Deliveries arriving unscheduled create queues at the dock, idle labour between arrivals, and rushed unloading when three trucks appear together. Scheduled inbound windows are free to implement and typically recover meaningful labour.

And packaging arrives in whatever form the supplier prefers, which may require repacking before it can be stored or issued — a labour cost created entirely by an inbound specification nobody set.

Taking Control of Inbound

Switch to ex-works or free-carrier terms on significant lanes and arrange freight yourself. This is the single highest-value change available in first-mile logistics for most manufacturers, and it’s resisted mainly because it adds coordination work.

Once you control it, consolidation becomes possible: milk runs collecting from several suppliers in a region, backhaul matching against your outbound vehicles, and mode choices made on your economics rather than your supplier’s convenience.

Get the freight cost out of the unit price first. Ask suppliers to quote ex-works alongside delivered, and the freight component becomes visible. The gap is frequently larger than expected.

Last-mile Realities

Outbound has its own recurring losses, mostly around delivery windows and failed deliveries. Narrow customer windows force dedicated trips. Failed deliveries double the cost of that drop and nobody attributes the second attempt to the original order.

Order profile matters more than most manufacturers realise. Frequent small orders from the same customer cost far more to serve than consolidated ones, and if your pricing doesn’t reflect that, you’re subsidising a behaviour you could change with a conversation or a minimum order incentive.

Where to Look First

Calculate inbound freight as a percentage of purchase spend. Many manufacturers can’t, which is itself the finding. Then map inbound volume by supplier region and look for consolidation opportunities — the obvious ones are usually visible immediately on a map.

On outbound, calculate cost to serve per customer including delivery frequency and failed attempts. The distribution is typically wide, and the customers at the expensive end are rarely the ones anyone would have guessed.

Neither exercise requires new systems. Both use invoice and order data you already hold, assembled in a way nobody has yet had reason to assemble it — which is why the findings tend to be surprising to people who assumed logistics was already well understood.

ticktick.ai tracks inbound and outbound freight against orders and customers, so consolidation opportunities and cost-to-serve differences surface from routine transaction data.