Freight savings, on contingency
If we don't save you money, you don't pay.
CPC audits 6–12 months of your transportation data, negotiates measurable savings across your freight program, and takes its fee only out of the savings it delivers. Zero upfront cost. Zero obligation.
- 25+ yrs
- Optimizing supply chains
- $100Ms
- Returned to client bottom lines
- $0
- Upfront — no savings, no fee
Illustrative only — sample lanes and rates shown. Your actual proposal is built from your own data during the no-cost, no-obligation evaluation.
Trusted by transportation & finance leaders at
Where the savings come from
Every mode has its own kind of waste.
CPC runs the same intelligence engines across all three — but what they look for, and what they recover, is different in each. Switch modes to see how.
Ground & parcel · Ocean containers · Air & ULD
Ground · LTL · Truckload · Parcel
You're buying more truck, and more service, than your freight needs.
Ground programs leak in the gaps between shipments: two orders to the same ZIP on the same day booked as two LTL moves, freight riding an expedited service level that the delivery date never required, and a carrier base so wide that no lane earns real volume leverage. CPC's engines read your shipment history and find the movements that should have been one movement — then take that evidence into the carrier negotiation.
- $1.2M
- Saved on the Kawasaki transportation optimization
- 30%
- Reduction in LTL cost on that same program
- 82 → 9
- Carrier base consolidated on a global program
- Consolidation
- Mode optimization
- Zone-skip & pooling
- Scheduled linehaul
- Service-level fit
- Dedicated routes
- Accessorial audit
- Carrier negotiation
A global transportation program consolidated its carrier base from 82 carriers down to 9 — and delivered 132% of the stated savings target.
- Shipments to ZIP 60601, Tue–Thu
- 3 separate BOLs
- Booked as 3 × LTL
- $2,340
- Combined weight
- 14,200 lb
- Single volume-partial move
- $1,485
- Recovered on this pattern
- $855 / occurrence
- Occurrences found in 12 months
- 148
Illustrative of the output format. Your figures are produced from your own shipment file during the assessment.
Ocean · FCL · LCL · Container utilization
The carrier bills the box, not the cubic meters inside it.
A container costs the same whether it leaves full or a third full — so every unused cubic meter is freight spend on air. CPC audits your ocean file for containers that shipped inside the same window to the same destination and models what they would have cost as one consolidated move. The gap between what you paid and what the cargo actually needed is the recoverable number.
- 72 CBM
- Across 3 shipments in one week — enough for a single 40'HC
- 32%
- Average utilization as those containers actually shipped
- $10,000
- Recovered on that one pattern at $5,000 per container
- Container consolidation
- CBM utilization audit
- Empty-space costing
- LCL vs FCL breakpoint
- Sailing-window pooling
- NVOCC named-account status
- Carrier negotiation
Worked example. Three shipments totalling 72 CBM left within the same week, each in its own container at $5,000 — $15,000 of freight. A single 40'HC holds 76 CBM, so all three fit in one box at 95% utilization. Cost after consolidation: $5,000. Recovered: $10,000. Repeat that pattern weekly and it is $520,000 a year.
Ship 1
32%
Ship 2
32%
Ship 3
32%
Merged
95%
- Cargo volume audited
- 72.0 CBM
- Paid — 3 containers @ $5,000
- $15,000
- Theoretical waste (empty space)
- 156 CBM unused
- Consolidated — 1 × 40'HC
- $5,000
- Savings identified
- $10,000
Illustrative at $5,000/container. Your assessment uses your own lane rates, sailing windows and CBM.
Air · ULD build-up · Parcel air
Air is billed on the bigger of two numbers. Usually the one you can control.
Every air waybill is rated on chargeable weight — the greater of actual kilos and volumetric kilos. Build a ULD loosely and the volumetric figure wins, so you are invoiced for weight that was never on the scale. CPC audits the gap between actual and chargeable across your air file, identifies which lanes and which SKUs are inflating it, and tests whether the service level was ever required in the first place.
- Dim gap
- Actual vs volumetric kilos, measured per shipment
- 1:6000
- IATA volumetric divisor — couriers often rate at 1:5000
- Service fit
- Was express bought where standard would have delivered?
- Chargeable-weight audit
- Dim-gap analysis
- ULD build-up density
- Service-level fit
- Air vs ocean vs ground trade-off
- Parcel air rate review
- Carrier negotiation
The most expensive air freight is the freight that never needed to fly. Before optimizing the rate, CPC's service-level engine checks the delivery requirement against the transit actually purchased — because downgrading an unnecessary expedite beats negotiating a better price on it.
- Actual weight tendered
- 1,800 kg
- Volumetric weight @ 1:6000
- 2,400 kg
- Billed on
- 2,400 kg
- Dim gap — weight never shipped
- 600 kg
- At $4.50 / kg
- $2,700 per shipment
- Densifying the build-up recovers
- up to $2,700
Illustrative at $4.50/kg. Your assessment measures the real gap across your own air waybills.
The model
Our fee comes out of your savings. Nothing else.
Most consultants bill for time. CPC gets paid only when your freight bill goes down — so our incentives and yours point in exactly the same direction.
Upfront, ever
The evaluation, the analysis, and the savings proposal cost you nothing. No retainers, no hourly billing, no obligation to proceed.
Fee from savings only
When CPC's program takes effect, our fee is carved out of the dollars we actually save you. Spend $40M today, save 25%, and your new spend is $30M — the fee comes from the $10M you weren't keeping anyway.
Guaranteed savings
If the assessment doesn't uncover real, measurable savings, you walk away owing nothing. You have nothing to lose and everything to gain.
Typical consulting engagement
You pay, then hope it works.
- Retainer or hourly fees start before any savings exist
- You carry the risk if the analysis finds nothing
- The invoice arrives whether results do or not
- Incentives reward billable hours, not your bottom line
The CPC model
We find it, then we share it.
- $0 upfront — evaluation, analysis and proposal cost nothing
- CPC's fee is carved out of the savings, so it is funded by money you weren't keeping
- No savings found means no fee owed, and you keep the analysis
- We only earn when your freight bill actually drops
The short version: you are never writing CPC a check out of your own pocket. Every dollar of our fee is funded by money that was previously leaving your business as excess freight cost.
No savings · No fee
The process
Starting with CPC is simple.
For over 25 years, CPC has optimized supply chains for shippers from the mid-market to the global enterprise — adding hundreds of millions of dollars to client bottom lines that would otherwise have been left on the negotiating table.
STEP 01
Submit your data
Share 6–12 months of transportation data — invoices, rate agreements, and shipment history — for CPC to review.
You provide: freight data
STEP 02
Review the assessment
CPC analyzes your lanes, modes, and rates, then presents a clear savings proposal with the numbers behind it.
You receive: savings proposal
STEP 03
Start saving
Move forward with CPC and begin realizing measurable savings — with our fee paid entirely from the results.
You keep: the savings
No cost. No obligation. Your data stays confidential.
No-cost freight evaluation
Find out what you're overpaying. Free.
Tell us about your freight program and CPC will review it against benchmark rates. If we can't find savings, there's nothing to pay for — and nothing to decide.
- You never pay out of pocketCPC's fee is taken from the savings we deliver. No savings found, no fee owed — ever.
- No obligation to proceedReview the assessment, keep the analysis, and walk away if the numbers don't work for you.
- Your data stays confidentialCPC works exclusively for shippers — never for carriers. Your rates are never shopped around.
- Takes about 2 minutesFour quick questions. No spend data required to start the conversation.
CPC's performance guarantee
CPC guarantees a return on investment within six months — or refunds the entire fee. Combined with fees paid only from realized savings, the downside is zero.
Proprietary analysis
Seven engines. Seven different questions.
CPC's transportation intelligence engines run independently and continuously against your shipment data. Each one asks a different optimization question — and every answer it returns shows the calculation behind it.
ENGINE 01
Consolidation
Evaluates same-address and same-ZIP destinations against shipment dates, hold windows, weight and cost to determine whether separate movements should have been one.
“Should these shipments have shipped together?”
ENGINE 02
Destination Density
Maps where volume is concentrating by ZIP3/ZIP5, city, metro, state or region — using spend, frequency, consignee concentration and consistency over time.
“Where is our freight actually going?”
ENGINE 03
Mode Optimization
Tests every shipment against Parcel, Hundredweight, LTL, Volume LTL, Partial Truckload, Truckload, Air and Expedited to find the mode the freight actually warranted.
“Is this on the right mode?”
ENGINE 04
Pooling / Zone-Skip
Finds freight that could bypass individual LTL and parcel movements by riding a linehaul to a pool point and distributing regionally from there.
“Can we skip the zones we're paying for?”
ENGINE 05
Scheduled Linehaul
Detects recurring lane and day-of-week volume patterns strong enough to support a scheduled departure instead of transactional, spot-priced shipping.
“Is this pattern regular enough to schedule?”
ENGINE 06
Service Level
Compares requested service and MABD requirements against actual transit, delivery performance and cost to expose service that was bought but never needed.
“Are we buying more speed than the date requires?”
ENGINE 07
Dedicated Transportation
Determines when recurring volume justifies a dedicated truck, milk run, multi-stop truckload or recurring route — weighing weight, pallets, stops, mileage, frequency and markets.
“Does this volume deserve its own truck?”
THE OUTPUT
Carrier negotiation, with evidence
Every engine finding becomes leverage at the table. CPC negotiates against your own documented patterns and benchmark rates — not against a generic market average.
“Now here is what the data says it should cost.”
They run continuously, not once. Because the engines operate independently against the same normalized dataset, one shipment file can surface a consolidation opportunity, a mode downgrade and a dedicated-route candidate at the same time — each priced separately so nothing is double-counted.
Data to decision
Your data goes in. A priced opportunity list comes out.
The assessment is not a slide deck of generalities. It is your own shipment file, normalized, run through the engines, and returned as opportunities you can action — each with the arithmetic attached.
- 1
Intake
You send 6–12 months of freight data in whatever shape it exists — invoices, TMS exports, carrier reports, spreadsheets.
- 2
Normalize
Every file is parsed and mapped into one canonical schema — lanes, modes, weights, dates, accessorials and charges reconciled to invoice totals.
- 3
Engines
The seven engines run against the normalized set, each scoring opportunities independently and showing the calculation behind every finding.
- 4
Report
Findings are benchmarked, ranked and delivered as an executive assessment and interactive dashboards you can explore by lane, mode and carrier.
CPC assessment dashboard — savings by lane, mode & carrier
Primary dashboard view
Image pending upload — savings waterfall by lane, mode and carrier with drill-through.
Container utilization
Image pending upload
Opportunity register
Image pending upload
Interactive reporting built in Power BI. Filter by lane, mode, carrier, consignee or date range — every opportunity traces back to the shipments that produced it.
What we do
Every lever on your freight spend, pulled by specialists.
CPC works across your entire transportation program — procurement, cost engineering, and network design — in every major mode.
Freight Audit and Payment
Line-item audits that recover overcharges hidden in carrier invoices — rates, accessorials, fuel surcharges, and minimum charges — then renegotiate the terms that caused them. Contingency-based: $0 upfront.
View freight audit service →Freight Procurement
Market-tested bids and carrier negotiations that put competitive pressure back on your rates — without burning carrier relationships.
Explore procurement →Program / Cost reductionFreight Cost Reduction
Line-item audits of rates, accessorials, and fuel surcharges to find the dollars hiding inside invoices you're already paying.
Explore cost reduction →Program / NetworkFreight Network Optimization
Mode, lane, and consolidation strategy that restructures how freight moves — so savings survive long after the negotiation.
Explore optimization →Mode expertise
Proof
Industry leaders keep the savings — and keep coming back.
22%
Average net savings achieved for CPC clients
7:1
CPC's average return on investment per project
Since 1998
Working exclusively for shippers — never for carriers
$0
Upfront cost. Fees are paid only from realized savings
CPC Consultants became a trusted partner supporting us at every stage of our growth. Their solutions reduced costs by over 20% while improving transit times and increasing throughput by 10X — providing strategic direction that let us hold a competitive advantage from launch through our acquisition by Nordstrom.
Even one year after the project, and over one million dollars in savings, I still receive kudos from upper management. CPC makes me look good.
We approached CPC Consultants asking them to gather competitive intelligence and conduct a benchmark study within an extremely tight timeline. CPC's team of experts was able to quickly execute and deliver on time and on budget.
Representative results. Kawasaki: $1.2M saved and 30% off LTL cost. A global program: carrier base cut from 82 to 9, hitting 132% of the savings target. A warehouse: picking time from 100 seconds to 15 per order.
Case results are specific to the facts and scope of each engagement and are not averages, typical results, or guarantees. See full case studies →
As featured on “Inside the Blueprint” — see how CPC's team helps shippers control freight spend.
Watch the feature →Common questions
What’s the catch?
The most common questions shippers ask before sending their first file.
If the evaluation is free, how does CPC get paid?
CPC is paid from the savings it delivers. If your freight spend is $40 million and CPC's program brings it to $30 million, the fee is taken out of that $10 million difference — not out of your operating budget. You are never writing a check funded by anything other than money you were previously losing to excess freight cost.
What if you don't find any savings?
Then you owe nothing. CPC's published promise is straightforward: we deliver savings or you pay nothing. You keep the analysis either way, and you're under no obligation to proceed at any point.
What data do I need to provide?
Typically 6–12 months of transportation data — freight invoices, rate agreements, and shipment history. If you're not sure what you have or what format it's in, start the conversation anyway; a specialist will tell you what's usable.
Will my rates be shared with carriers?
No. CPC states that it works exclusively for the shipper, never for carriers or providers. Your data is used to build your assessment and nothing else.
How long does an assessment take?
It depends on the size and cleanliness of your data. The intake conversation takes about fifteen minutes; the assessment itself follows once your data is in hand, and you'll be given a timeline up front rather than after the fact.
Do we have to change carriers?
Not necessarily. Savings often come from renegotiated rates, corrected accessorials, mode and routing changes, or invoice errors within your existing carrier base. CPC's approach is to apply competitive pressure without needlessly burning working carrier relationships.
We're mid-contract. Is it too early to talk?
No — knowing where you stand before a renewal is the point. An assessment run ahead of your renewal date gives you benchmark data at the negotiating table instead of after you've signed.
How big does our freight spend need to be?
CPC works with shippers from the mid-market through global enterprises. If you're unsure whether your program is large enough to be worth reviewing, that's a reasonable first question for the discovery call.
Send the data. Keep the savings.
Six to twelve months of freight data is all it takes to find out what you’re overpaying. The evaluation is free, the proposal is free, and if there are no savings, there is no fee.
Prefer the phone? (949) 645-4087