Four companies. Four TMSs. One operating model, and the hold period already running.
The diligence model priced the synergies. It did not price the engineering underneath them — master data, portals, carrier connections, billing, reporting. That work lands in the first eighteen months and decides whether the platform thesis holds or whether you own four companies sharing a logo.We are an engineering team focused on logistics: carrier integrations, WMS and TMS, EDI, rating, accessorials, freight audit and payment. Nobody here needs the 214 explained, or why a rate table has a version history.
Two systems of record, one promised experience, no reconciliation layer between them.
Read these for speed and repeatability, not for volume.The question that matters to a platform is not how large the system was. It is how much cheaper the second one is than the first.
Adding a connection stopped being a project. At a non-asset 3PL running LTL, FTL, parcel and international freight, we put every carrier behind one internal adapter layer with a circuit breaker per carrier. New carrier onboarding went from three weeks to four days, and monthly billing losses fell from $45,000 to $3,800 (C01). That is the shape a roll-up needs: each additional connection becomes configuration, not code.
Different formats, one truth, automatically. At a US freight broker taking roughly 12,000 invoices a month from eight carriers — eight rate structures, PDFs and EDI 210 mixed — we normalized everything into one canonical invoice object and checked every line against the contracted rate card. Monthly recovery went from $8,000 to $67,000 (C06). Substitute “four entities’ billing systems” for “eight carriers” and it is the same engineering job.
A reliability floor somebody owns. At a 3PL fulfillment hub moving 35,000+ shipments a day, reliability was felt rather than measured until we set an SLO per critical integration with a monthly error-budget review. P1 MTTR went from 45–90 minutes to 11, and availability of critical integrations reached 99.6% against 94.1% the year before (C09). That is the mechanism under a cross-entity KPI — not a dashboard, a defined number per integration with a name against it.
What we have not done.
We have not consolidated four entities into one operating model.
There is no post-merger case on this site because we do not have one. No sponsor reference, no day-100 playbook with our name on it.What we have is the six-item backlog above, done one item at a time, at single companies, in production, under deadline, by people who work in this industry. Integration layers, billing normalization, reliability floors. The engineering is the same engineering.The parts we have not proven are the ones specific to your situation: sequencing six workstreams across entities that have their own leadership and their own opinion about whose system wins, working against a TSA clock, and holding service quality steady while the merge runs underneath it.We are saying this here because twenty minutes of diligence would find it anyway, and because the alternative is a pitch that implies more than it can show.Two practical consequences. If what you need is a firm that has run this five times for other sponsors, hire that firm — it exists, and it is not us. And if you do engage us, scope the first entity small enough that being wrong about us costs two weeks, not two quarters.
Selling, not buying?
Before diligence opens, the buyer's engineers will ask what runs where, who owns it, and what breaks if the one developer who knows it leaves. We map it, fix what would knock down the price, and hand you the document the buyer's team will ask for.
A portfolio-level assessment, scoped and priced per entity.
Per entity it is the same two-week pass we run at a single company: instrument what is actually running, map the integration surface and the billing logic, and rank the failures by what they cost — in dollars, with the evidence attached.What portfolio level adds is the comparison. Which entity is the reference implementation. Which workstream is common to all of them and should be built once. Which one constrains everything else, so the sequence is set by dependency rather than by whichever entity’s leadership pushes hardest.The unit is the single-entity diagnostic: two weeks, $7,500, fixed scope. A portfolio assessment is priced from that unit and runs entity by entity, so you can stop after the first one. The findings document is yours either way, written to be read by an operating partner and a CTO at the same time.If you are not sure where the problem is, start here. Nothing after it is required.