Will service levels be protected?

Yes. Service KPIs are tracked alongside savings to prevent degradation.

Can the program run alongside current operations?

Yes. Interventions are phased to avoid major operational disruption.

Cost Reduction Programs - Lower Spend Without Service Compromise

Targeted interventions across transport, warehousing, and inventory economics.

Cost Cuts Fail When They Ignore Operations Reality

Across-the-board cuts often damage service quality. Vistar identifies structural and process inefficiencies that reduce logistics spend while protecting customer and production commitments.

How We Deliver Cost Reduction

Cost Baseline and Leakage Mapping

Break down costs by node, lane, process, and exception source.

Intervention Design

Define quick wins and structural levers with quantified impact potential.

Execution and KPI Tracking

Implement and monitor savings realization against target.

Sustainable Savings

Savings come from process and network fixes, not temporary cuts.

Lower Cost-to-Serve

Reduce avoidable spend in transport, storage, and exception handling.

Transparent Impact Tracking

Savings tracked by lever with ownership and timeline accountability.

Rates are the most visible cost and rarely the largest

Freight rates and storage tariffs attract most of the negotiating effort because they are itemised and comparable. The larger recoverable cost usually sits in the structure that generates those invoices rather than in their unit prices.

How many times material is handled between supplier and line. How much inventory the network holds to absorb its own unreliability. How much premium freight is spent correcting problems created upstream. How much labour is spent on rework. Each of those is a consequence of a design decision, and none of them responds to procurement pressure.

This is also why rate-led savings tend not to persist. A renegotiated rate has moved cost to a supplier who will seek it back at renewal; a network that handles material once instead of three times has removed the cost permanently.

Cost to serve, not cost per unit

Cost per unit shipped is the standard measure and it conceals the variation that matters. Different customers, products and channels consume very different amounts of the same operation.

A customer requiring small frequent deliveries into a narrow receiving window costs far more to serve than one accepting weekly full loads, even at identical volume and price. A product with a large slow-moving tail consumes storage that a fast-moving line does not. Averaging across them produces a number that describes nobody and hides the accounts and SKUs where margin is actually being lost.

Allocating handling, storage and transport to the flows that cause them changes what the conversation is about. It usually turns out that a small number of arrangements consume a disproportionate share of the operation, and those are addressable individually - by changing the order pattern, the delivery frequency or the price - without touching anything else.

Allocate cost to the flow that causes it, not evenly across volume.
Look at delivery frequency and window width, not just volume and rate.
Expect a minority of accounts or SKUs to consume a majority of the operation.

Savings that survive the year they are booked

A reduction is only real if it is still there at the next review, and the difference between the two is usually whether the underlying activity was removed or merely repriced.

Removing a handling step, consolidating two part-loads into one vehicle, or eliminating the cause of a recurring rework loop all take cost out permanently, because the work no longer happens. Deferring maintenance, running leaner on labour than the volume supports, or squeezing a rate below what a carrier can sustain all reduce this period's cost and create a liability that surfaces later, often as service failure.

It is worth classifying every proposed saving as one or the other before committing to it, and being honest that the second kind is sometimes the right short-term choice - provided everyone knows that is what it is.

Where structural cost is identified