Modernizing a national logistics fleet on S/4HANA.
Delivered through our QBS Co. partnership: a national carrier's aging ERP and disconnected dispatch were unified on SAP S/4HANA, giving the fleet one real-time backbone for orders, routing, freight audit, and cost-per-mile — and turning empty miles back into margin.
Published June 14, 2026 · Updated June 19, 2026
The context
A national logistics operator was running a modern fleet on a legacy backbone. Orders, telematics, dispatch, and billing lived in separate systems, so dispatchers planned routes and backhauls by hand and finance paid freight invoices it had no time to audit. This program was delivered with and through the QBS Co. enterprise-delivery partnership, drawing on QBS's SAP S/4HANA implementation experience.
The challenge
The numbers in trucking leave no room for leakage. Industry research put 2024 truckload operating margins at -2.3%, with the average cost to run a truck at $2.26 per mile — and empty (deadhead) miles averaging 16.7% of total miles, every one of them burning fuel and driver wages while earning nothing. On the billing side, an estimated 5–15% of freight invoices contain errors, and 2–5% of transportation spend is typically recoverable through audit. Without an integrated backbone, none of it was visible until the money was already gone.
Representative outcome modeled on industry benchmarks; individual results vary.
How we delivered it.
- 1
Unified the fleet on SAP S/4HANA as a single real-time backbone, integrating TMS, ELD/telematics, and order data so dispatch stopped living in spreadsheets.
- 2
Layered route-and-backhaul optimization that sequences stops and flags deadhead legs before a load is dispatched.
- 3
Built an automated freight-bill audit pipeline that checks invoices line-by-line against contracted rates and accessorials, routing overcharges to a recovery queue.
- 4
Surfaced cost-per-mile, empty-mile, and on-time dashboards so operators manage the levers that actually move margin.
What we built
- An SAP S/4HANA core unifying orders, dispatch, telematics, and billing
- Route and backhaul optimization that flags empty miles pre-dispatch
- An automated freight-audit pipeline with an overcharge-recovery queue
- Cost-per-mile and deadhead dashboards for dispatch and finance
The outcomes
Representative outcome modeled on industry benchmarks; individual results vary.
“On negative-margin lanes, cutting even a quarter of the empty miles is the difference between losing and making money on the route. The backbone made those miles visible for the first time.”
The service and the related work.
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