MERIDIAN FOODS · CPG · LOGISTICS
Cross-border logistics and financial re-engineering.
Restructured EU distribution, renegotiated carriers, and rebuilt finance views around landed cost so margin conversations finally matched reality on the dock.
- Client
- Meridian Foods
- Sector
- CPG · Logistics
- Timeline
- 16 weeks
- Services
- FP&A, carrier strategy, systems alignment
The challenge
Margin was a spreadsheet; logistics was a phone tree
Meridian’s EU expansion outpaced its finance architecture. Each market ran its own landed-cost assumptions, while logistics negotiated carriers regionally without a consolidated view of volume commitments. When commodity inputs spiked, the board asked why gross margin diverged from plan — and nobody could answer in one sitting.
The engagement started after a quarter-end close overran by twelve days. Nikos led the finance thread; our logistics partner embedded with their COO’s office. Constraints were political as much as technical: subsidiaries guarded local relationships, and IT refused another “temporary” data lake.
We agreed to anchor everything on dock events and purchase orders that already existed in NetSuite, rather than inventing parallel ledgers. Anything that could not trace to a shipment ID was out of scope for phase one.
Our approach
One landed-cost language from warehouse to board deck
Framing. We treated this as a margin truth programme: if finance and ops could not agree on landed cost at line-item grain, no dashboard would help.
Model choices. We standardised allocation keys for duty, freight, and fuel surcharges, then published the rules in a living memo signed weekly by finance and ops leads. Power BI sat on top of NetSuite extracts; SAP TM fed lane-level actuals into the same nightly job so planners did not cherry-pick spreadsheets.
Phasing. Weeks 1–4: data reconciliation war room — ugly but fast. Weeks 5–10: carrier renegotiation with committed volumes tied to the new visibility. Weeks 11–16: margin review cadence rewired so category managers saw the same numbers as treasury.
Judgment. We blocked a “big bang” ERP carve-out proposal that would have blown the timeline. We also insisted on naming a single executive approver for assumption changes — uncomfortable, and necessary.
The outcome
The dock and the board deck finally referenced the same file
Landed cost on the heaviest inbound lanes fell 19% against the prior-year baseline after re-routing and re-pricing — with audit-friendly logs for how each change flowed into margin. Gross margin at the category level improved 28 percentage points in the reporting pack the board used (definitions held constant).
Twelve EU markets now share a harmonised monthly pack; close cycle from dock receipt to booked accrual dropped 40% in elapsed days because accruals stopped waiting for email threads.
Meridian retained us for two follow-on sprints on working capital and intercompany billing — the original programme closed with signed playbooks their Big Four firm later reused.
Results
Results in numbers
- landed costblended inbound lanes vs. prior-year baseline
- -19%
- gross margincategory-level after re-allocation of duties
- +28pts
- EU marketsharmonised reporting pack per subsidiary
- 12
- Close cycledays from dock receipt to booked accrual
- -40%
What we learned
What we underestimated
We misjudged how long local MDs would tolerate “temporary” transparency into their margins. Easing that with a staged rollout would have saved goodwill. We were surprised how much value came from rewriting approval paths rather than adding more charts.
Next time we would pair a communications lead earlier — numbers moved, but narratives lagged. We also tightened our template for assumption change logs after one subsidiary reverted a fuel surcharge key quietly.
Tech stack
What shipped in production
- NetSuite
- Power BI
- SAP TM
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