Walk the floor at Manifest and it’s easy to come away with ten different “priorities”: visibility, AI, automation, global trade, resilience, last mile, orchestration. All valid.
But if you’re an executive, you do not leave a conference with ten priorities. You leave with two or three things you’re willing to fund, sponsor, and measure.
A useful way to cut through the noise is to ask, after every session:
Will this protect margin, free up cash, or improve our ability to keep customer promises?
Most supply chain initiatives are sold as “operational”. The outcomes are financial.
A weekday afternoon you’ll recognise
Here’s the kind of week that turns supply chain into a board-level issue, fast. It’s Tuesday, mid-afternoon. One cross-border order that should be routine isn’t moving.
- The carrier feed says “delivered”, but there’s no proof of delivery.
- The warehouse system shows the shipment left, but the timestamp is different to the transport timestamp.
- Customer service has already promised a delivery date twice, and it has now slipped again.
- A return request comes in before the parcel even arrives.
Then the knock-on effects start:
- Ops escalates, someone chases a broker, someone chases the carrier, someone pulls a spreadsheet because the systems don’t agree.
- Finance holds the invoice because the accessorial charges look wrong and there’s no clean evidence trail. Accruals drift because costs land late and inconsistently.
- Customer service issues a goodwill refund to protect the relationship.
- Leadership asks a simple question: “How often does this happen, what does it cost us, and why can’t we prevent it?”
That is not a “visibility problem”. It’s a value problem. And it usually comes back to three gaps.
1) “Dirty data” is not abstract. It looks like this.
Most teams don’t struggle with data because they lack dashboards. They struggle because the underlying operational record is unreliable in small, painful ways:
- Conflicting timestamps between systems (pickup time, handover time, delivery time).
- Missing or mismatched evidence (no POD, wrong reference, incomplete scan history).
- Duplicated shipments or reused identifiers that blur what actually happened.
- Carrier event codes that don’t map cleanly to your exception reasons.
- Promise dates being overwritten by downstream changes, so nobody knows which commitment is real.
When those issues show up, your organisation pays for them repeatedly: in manual chasing, invoice disputes, expediting, refunds, buffer stock, and time spent explaining variance to finance.
Reliable foundations are not glamorous, but they are the quickest route to fewer expensive “surprises”.
2) Handoffs are where time and money disappear
E-commerce logistics is a network: warehouses, carriers, marketplaces, brokers, parcel partners, returns processors.
Most cost creep comes from the transitions between them, especially cross-border. Not because partners are incompetent, but because the handoff is rarely a clean transfer of:
- status that means the same thing to both sides
- documents and compliance steps embedded in the workflow
- evidence that can be reused for disputes and customer comms
When that isn’t true, small exceptions become long exceptions. Long exceptions become escalations. Escalations become margin leakage.
3) Decisioning fails when it ignores finance realities
A lot of supply chain teams can “see” issues now. Fewer can decide and act with the financial trade-offs in view.
In practice, finance-aware decisioning means things like:
- Expediting is guided by customer value and margin impact, not panic.
- Exceptions are prioritised by service risk and cost-to-serve, not the loudest internal stakeholder.
- Cross-border delays trigger a defined next action (reroute, intervene, communicate, hold), not a week of chasing updates.
This is where the newest tools can help, but only if your signals are trusted and your workflows are clear. Otherwise you just get faster alerts and the same firefighting.
What to do next (without turning it into a programme)
If you’re leaving Manifest with a shortlist of moves, keep it practical:
- Standardise the record of truth
Align the handful of definitions that drive money: order, shipment, promise date, exception, charge, proof.
- Make handoffs explicit
Decide what “good” looks like at the boundaries: shared event meaning, embedded documentation, consistent evidence.
- Bring finance into the moment of action
Make it normal for ops teams to see the likely cost and cash impact of the choices they make to protect service.
None of this is about adding bureaucracy. It’s about removing ambiguity that your organisation is currently paying for.
If you’re at Manifest
GN TEQ works with e-commerce logistics teams on exactly these friction points: making operational data reliable, connecting handoffs across the network, and bringing margin and cash realities into day-to-day decisions.
If you want to compare notes on where value is leaking in your operation, meet us at Manifest.
