The Australian transport industry, and the transport industry in general, can be characterised by its razor-thin margins. Rising fuel costs, wage pressures, regulatory compliance, and ongoing equipment maintenance all eat into profit. Add to that increasing customer expectations around delivery times and service quality, and it’s clear that simply working harder isn’t enough. To stay competitive and grow, transport businesses need to work smarter.
Specifically, this means digging into your data. By knowing your numbers and understanding where your money is going, you can make decisions that boost profitability without compromising service. It’s uncovering the hidden opportunities that already exist within your operations without cutting corners.
This blog explores how to maximise profits in transport through data, focusing on three practical areas: cost-per-kilometre analysis, job profitability tracking, and pricing accuracy through TMS insights.
Using data to leverage cost-per-kilometre analysis
Cost-per-kilometre is one of the most powerful metrics in the industry. It gives you a real-time, per-job view of your costs and helps you understand whether your business is operating efficiently.
By tracking key inputs like fuel usage, driver wages, vehicle maintenance, tolls, and other job-specific costs, you can calculate exactly what it costs to run your fleet on each route or type of delivery. This lets you:
- Identify loss-making routes or customers
- Compare the performance of different vehicles or drivers
- Make informed decisions about vehicle replacement or route changes
Using a TMS (Transport Management System) to collect and analyse this data gives you consistent, accurate insights you can act on. Businesses that maximise profits in transport through data often start with cost-per-kilometre analysis because it highlights issues you might not see otherwise.
Improved job profitability tracking
While cost-per-kilometre tells you how much you spend, job profitability shows you how much you make. Not all jobs are equal. Some look good on paper but prove uneconomical once all the costs are considered. Without a system in place to track true profitability, it’s easy to keep doing unprofitable work without realising it.
Using a data-driven approach, you can link revenue and expense data to each individual job. This means capturing:
- Agreed rates and fuel surcharges
- Extra charges like wait time or delivery windows
- Direct costs like fuel, driver hours, and tolls
- Overhead costs allocated across jobs
When you feed this data into a well-designed TMS, it can automatically generate profit margins per job, customer, or route. This insight helps you make smarter decisions about what work to take on, where to improve efficiency, and when it might be time to renegotiate contracts or drop loss-making customers.
Companies that maximise profits in transport through data are often surprised to find that a few specific customers or routes are dragging down their overall margins. Profitability tracking gives you the information you need to act on that knowledge.
Data-informed pricing accuracy via TMS insights
Pricing is one of the most important business decisions you make and one of the easiest to get wrong. Underquoting erodes margins and locks in unsustainable contracts. Overquoting can lose you business. Getting it right starts with understanding your true costs and using historical data to guide your quotes.
A modern TMS can store and analyse past job data, including:
- Costs per type of job or route
- Delivery timeframes and job complexity
- Fuel usage patterns and toll routes
- Driver efficiency and overheads
When pricing new work, you can use these insights to make sure you’re covering all your costs and hitting your desired profit margin. This also allows you to be more confident and competitive when quoting. If your competitors are quoting blind and you’re quoting with data, you’re already ahead.
Ultimately, maximise profits in transport through data by turning pricing into a strategic strength, not a guessing game.
Optimise your transport with data
Low margins don’t mean you need to be on the back foot when it comes to your profits. By working smarter and using your data to make better decisions every day, you can help your transport business to thrive.
Take control of your numbers across cost-per-kilometre, job profitability tracking, and accurate pricing, and you can transform hidden costs into actionable insights. Skip the guesswork and start using real numbers to guide your strategy.
A robust TMS makes this not only possible, but practical and straightforward. With the right tools and the right data, you can maximise profits in transport through data without adding more hours to your week.
Whether you’re running five trucks or 500, the principles are the same. Knowing your numbers is the fastest path to better margins, less stress, and a stronger, more resilient business. Your bottom line will thank you.
GoDesta has been built for accurate, up-to-date, and easy to analyse data that helps transport operators grow their profit margins. If you want to see what our TMS is capable of and how it can help your business, book a free demo with us and see for yourself.
GoDesta: Growing Transport Faster, Smarter