"Protecting Freight Margins Starts with a More Realistic Delivery Plan"
Freight operators responding to higher fuel costs face a difficult operational question: how much inefficiency can they remove without making deliveries less reliable? Combining routes or reducing delivery frequency may lower scheduled mileage, but those savings depend on whether the revised plan survives traffic, customer requirements and daily demand. The financial pressure extends beyond diesel. The American Transportation Research Institute’s 2026 operational-cost analysis put the average cost of operating a truck in 2025 at $2.336 per mile, up 3.4% from the previous year.
Remove Waste Before Changing Customer Commitments
In previous coverage by The Supply Chainer, Heather Mueller, Chief Client Strategy Officer at Breakthrough, described the need to evaluate operating priorities together. “The most successful organizations are integrating cost, service, and emissions into a single decision framework,” she said. That approach matters when a fuel-saving proposal changes delivery timing or available capacity. A cheaper route on paper still needs to meet the customer’s requirements when it reaches the road.
For Richard Savoie, CEO and Founder of Adiona Tech, the initial opportunity lies within existing operations. “The quickest win is usually the waste already sitting inside the plan,” he told The Supply Chainer. He identifies vehicles covering the same streets twice and larger vehicles running below capacity as areas to examine first. Addressing those inefficiencies can reduce unnecessary travel while preserving existing service commitments.
The starting point, however, is an accurate understanding of how long deliveries take. Savoie cautions that optimistic driving and stop-time assumptions leave insufficient room for congestion and time spent at customer locations. “Otherwise the plan falls apart by mid-morning, and you pay for it in idling, detours, and late deliveries,” he said. What appears to be an efficient schedule can therefore create additional fuel consumption as drivers attempt to recover lost time.
Test Consolidation Against Peak Demand
Before combining routes or changing delivery frequencies, Savoie recommends comparing actual and planned driving and service times by time of day. Planners should also examine on-time performance by customer, because some delivery windows cannot move. Vehicle utilisation needs to be assessed by both weight and volume across the week. An average load figure may conceal a capacity shortage on the day when demand is highest.
“A consolidation that looks fine on an average day can break on the peak day,” Savoie said. His recommended inputs also include telematics records of fuel consumption and idling, alongside driver hours and break requirements. These reveal constraints that a distance calculation alone cannot capture. A combined route may cover fewer miles but still become impractical once waiting time and available working hours are included.
Savoie recommends testing changes in simulation against real demand before implementation. The objective is to establish whether fuel consumption can fall while on-time performance holds. For managers, this creates a more demanding test than simply comparing the mileage of two proposed schedules. The revised plan must accommodate the actual workload, including delivery windows and the busiest operating periods.
Turn Operating Data into Decisions
The gap between knowing where inefficiency exists and resolving it has appeared in previous Supply Chainer coverage. Ajesh Kapoor, founder and chief executive of SemiCab, put the decision problem directly: “What should be done next, who should act, and what trade-off should be made” across operating priorities? His comments concerned the limits of visibility when teams still need to coordinate action across a freight network. Applied to fuel management, the same distinction separates identifying excessive idling or unused capacity from implementing a workable correction.
The financial assessment should also reach individual customers. Savoie recommends examining cost to serve so that frequency changes can target the least profitable stops rather than reduce service across the network. That analysis can help distinguish a costly delivery pattern from a wider problem with route design. It also provides a clearer basis for assessing whether a different schedule would improve an account’s economics.
The operational test is whether savings survive execution. If a consolidated route repeatedly requires additional trips or recovery work, its planned fuel savings may overstate the benefit. Savoie’s recommendations provide a framework for evaluating that risk, although his contribution does not include a measured savings figure or customer case study. For freight managers, the practical priority is to remove demonstrable waste, test changes against actual demand and assess fuel consumption alongside delivery performance.
