Taking eleven days of stock out of a brewery
The customer did not need faster freight. They needed freight that arrived when it said it would, so they could stop insuring against it with a warehouse.
The brewery imported malt through Ashport and shipped finished product east. Both legs were on the road, both were reliable on average, and neither was reliable on any particular day. The response — an entirely rational one — had been to hold eleven days of malt.
What actually changed
Moving to Corridor 4 did not make the freight much quicker. It made the arrival time knowable. A published 19-hour terminal-to-terminal transit that lands inside its window 96.8% of the time lets a production planner work to a four-day buffer instead of an eleven-day one.
Seven days of malt is a real number on a balance sheet, and it is worth more than the freight rate difference by a wide margin. This is the argument for a timetable, and it is nearly always an argument about variance rather than speed.
What we got wrong first
We initially quoted the lane in 40ft high cubes. Malt is dense enough that the boxes were weighing out at around 70% of capacity, so the customer was paying to move air-space they could not use. Switching the inbound leg to 20ft units cut the number of boxes and the cost per tonne. It took us two months to notice, which is why the load planner is now on the public website rather than in a spreadsheet on a sales laptop.