2026 · analysis · supply-chain · freight · asp
The Freight Rate That Passed and Shouldn't Have
A 2.13% aggregate freight rate, comfortably under a 3% target, was hiding a 57.8% per-order breach across 1,634 deliveries.
The metric was green. The metric was also an average, and averages are where problems go to hide.
What it is. An audit of LATAM freight performance across six countries that took a KPI already signed off as healthy and disaggregated it down to the order level.
Why it matters. Aggregate freight-to-sales came in at 2.13% against a 3% target. That is a passing number, and passing numbers stop getting looked at. Underneath it, 57.8% of individual orders across 1,634 deliveries, against $275M MXN of revenue, were in breach.
Payoff. $0.5M MXN quantified as recoverable, traced to northern-Mexico shipments running freight-to-sales above 1,000%, and the whole thing reframed from a rate problem into an order-sizing problem.
What this actually is
The team measured freight health as freight cost over sales, rolled up across the region. At 2.13% against a 3% ceiling, there was nothing to discuss.
But a regional average weights by revenue, which means large healthy orders can carry an arbitrary number of small catastrophic ones. Splitting the same data per order, the majority of deliveries were failing the same target the region was passing.
The extreme tail was northern-Mexico shipments where freight-to-sales ran above 1,000%, freight costing more than ten times the value of what was on the truck.
The reframe
The instinct with a freight problem is to go negotiate rates. That would have been the wrong project.
Nothing was wrong with the rates. What was wrong was the size of the orders being shipped against them. Small orders moving on the same lanes as large ones, each one paying a fixed cost the order value couldn't support.
That makes it an order-sizing and consolidation question, owned by commercial and planning, not a procurement question owned by logistics. Getting that distinction right is most of what the analysis was for.
What I'd tell someone starting this
Be suspicious of any KPI that has been green long enough that nobody reads it anymore. Aggregation is not neutral. It is a choice about what you are willing to stop seeing.
Also: the finding is only half the work. A number nobody owns doesn't get fixed, so the deliverable had to name whose problem it was.
Advanced Sterilization Products, LATAM commercial and logistics analytics.