Manufacturing case study
Manufacturing Group: 17% logistics cost reduction
A network review reset mode mix and inventory positioning across three product families.
The challenge
What was going wrong
Expedited airfreight had become routine. Inbound components arrived late often enough that the plant treated air as the default mode rather than the exception it was meant to be, and nobody had modelled what that was costing across a full year of production. The finance team suspected the expedite spend was significant but had no baseline to argue against, because the airfreight invoices sat in the same cost line as planned freight.
17%
lower logistics cost
64%
reduction in expedite spend
0
line stoppages after go-live
The solution
How the programme was built
01
Baseline the true cost
Bromley Logistics' supply chain consulting team rebuilt twelve months of movements into a single landed-cost model, including expedite spend, inventory carrying cost and an estimate of line-stoppage exposure that had never previously been quantified.
02
Reset mode mix
Predictable volume was shifted to sea freight with buffer stock held in bonded storage; air freight was reserved for genuine, unplanned exceptions rather than routine replenishment.
03
Reposition inventory
Component buffers were moved closer to the plant, cutting the response time that had justified defaulting to air in the first place and removing the underlying reason production kept escalating to premium freight.
04
Governance to make it stick
A quarterly review between the plant's operations director and Bromley Logistics tracks mode mix, expedite spend and inventory position against the plan, so the reset does not quietly drift back toward air freight once the initial pressure eases.
“The review paid for itself in the first quarter. We stopped paying air freight for a planning problem.”
Operations Director, Manufacturing Group
Services used
What this programme combined
ManufacturingIn operation
Inside the operation behind this result
The Manufacturing Group programme ran on the same operating model used across Bromley's client base: named account team, transparent costing and one accountable point of contact.
Air FreightProgramme results
What the numbers reflect
17%
lower logistics cost
64%
reduction in expedite spend
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