Surface shipping leader digitizes internal pricing engine to heal lanes, cut costs, and increase revenue
Modernizing lane pricing to eliminate inefficiencies, restore margins, and drive revenue.
Surface shipping leader digitizes lane pricing to reduce costs, heal unprofitable routes, and scale revenue profitably.
Client: Our client accelerates surface shipping, specializing in TL and LTL (truckload and less-than-truckload) linehaul, pick-up and delivery, intermodal drayage, pool distribution, and temperature-controlled logistics. With decades of industry experience, they’ve earned a reputation as a trusted single-source transportation partner known for flexibility, reliability, and personal service.
Challenge: They relied on manual processes and Excel-based models to price and adjust lanes. While leadership aimed for aggressive growth, the pricing team lacked the tools and data to support profitable scaling.
Because new customers lacked historical business data, the company relied on generic models and broad formulas to estimate costs, leading many lanes to be underpriced and unprofitable from the start.
As they onboarded more customers and added new lanes, revenue increased, but profitability declined. Some lanes generated healthy margins, but many operated at a loss, requiring sustained volume just to break even. Without a scalable pricing strategy, growth began to undermine financial performance.
Solution: Lumenalta began by transforming a legacy spreadsheet of customer pricing data into a web-based pricing platform hosted on Microsoft Azure. This centralized tool replaced disconnected Excel models with a live, data-driven system that integrates historical performance, pricing logic, and margin targets.
Key components of the solution included:
- Data infrastructure: We migrated customer and lane-level data to Databricks, coordinated by Azure Data Factory and Azure Functions to process and update data daily without incurring excessive Databricks compute costs.
- Web application: Built a responsive application that allows pricing analysts to:
- Instantly view and adjust rates at the account or lane level.
- Apply discounts and modify profit targets with one click.
- See the downstream impact of pricing changes on revenue and margin.
- Scalability and governance: Implemented business rules and guardrails, customized to leadership’s requirements, to ensure pricing decisions remained within acceptable thresholds, enabling the team to scale without compromising control.
The platform is now a daily-use tool for the pricing team, with ongoing enhancements based on real-world feedback. It supports growth while protecting margins, enabling the company to scale profitably.
Outcomes: With pricing digitized and governed at scale, the company moved from reactive decision-making to measurable, margin-protecting results:
Centralized pricing logic into a single source of truth, eliminating revenue leakage from manual errors and inconsistent pricing.
Centralized pricing logic into a single source of truth, eliminating revenue leakage from manual errors and inconsistent pricing.
- Empowered analysts will model pricing scenarios on a case-by-case basis, increasing speed and confidence in decision-making.
- Improved profitability by identifying and correcting underperforming lanes in real time.
- Enhanced alignment between pricing, finance, and leadership through increased visibility and transparency into pricing strategy and outcomes.
Increased
visibility and transparency across pricing and finance
Consolidated
pricing logic into one system of record
Improved
profitability by correcting underperforming lanes
Turn operational data into profitable decisions.
