Supply Chain Consulting: Securing Delivery, Releasing Capital

The discipline answers a conflict of goals, not a single metric. Delivery reliability can be bought with inventory, inventory can be cut by lowering service levels, freight cost can be cut by stretching lead times — and each of those moves is paid for out of a different budget. The work therefore starts with the question of which chain the business model actually needs: which sites, which lead times, which stock levels, which supplier structure.

It puts the three figures on one table. Delivery reliability measured against the first commitment, not against the date last moved. Tied-up capital broken down by coverage, turnover and obsolescence instead of reported as one inventory total. Freight cost never on its own, always next to the delivery date the customer experiences. Only in that view does it show that the bottleneck rarely sits where the pain appears — a backlog in shipping is often a planning error from the week before.

It separates the symptom from the cause. Where stock stands in for missing planning, cutting stock stays ineffective as long as the planning is untouched: a forecast nobody believes gets buried under inventory for years. The other way round, freight cost per shipment can be squeezed until the delivery date at the customer breaks. Both are displacements, not improvements.

It prices the alternatives with your own numbers. Nearshoring, a second source, a different mode mix or a new set of service providers may cost more per unit and still pay for themselves through downtime avoided. Whether that holds in a given case follows from real volumes, real freight rates and real lead times, not from a benchmark.

The market uses several names for the same work: supply chain consulting, supply chain management consulting, supply chain strategy consulting. Buyers comparing providers search for supply chain consulting firms or supply chain consulting companies, and anyone looking for one person rather than a provider tends to search for a consultant supply chain management. Behind all of these sits the same question of network, planning, inventory and logistics. For international organizations we work bilingually; the project language follows your team.

What it does not do. It does not run the daily disposition and it does not negotiate with your suppliers. And it cannot settle a conflict of goals the company is not willing to settle: whoever asks for higher delivery reliability and lower stock at once, without touching the planning, gets neither — except on paper.

Not on this page: the buying side of the chain. Category strategy, supplier selection, negotiation and savings programs sit in procurement consulting; the administrative process view sits in process consulting, the plant-side view in operations consulting. In practice the fields overlap, which is why supply chain and purchasing almost always work the same case together.

We bill on a daily rate. How high it sits is decided by the market first and by the CV second. Availability weighs heaviest: anyone who has actually run planning software in production or rebuilt a distribution network once is thinly staffed, and a start on short notice lifts the rate further. Project duration works the other way: a twelve-month mandate costs less per day than a three-week one. The on-site share is rarely negotiable here — planning, coordination rounds and system work run largely remote, questions about plants, warehouses and suppliers do not. The industry shows up wherever documentation duties come in: temperature-controlled goods, dangerous goods and regulated manufacturing require prior experience and narrow the field. Seniority stands deliberately at the end of this list — it decides whether someone writes a result or carries a decision, but it explains less of the picture than is generally assumed.

The ranges below come from our own role pages in supply chain management. They are reference figures from our own base and not an offer. Analytical and planning profiles — supply chain analyst, inventory manager, demand planner, transportation manager, logistics planner — sit between €700 and €1,050. Specialist roles with their own scope — customs expert, logistics manager, S&OP manager — sit between €800 and €1,300. Network, resilience and system profiles — supply chain consultant, nearshoring consultant, supply chain resilience consultant, SCM digitalization consultant and the supply chain manager — sit between €1,000 and €1,600. For departmental responsibility on a temporary basis, the interim supply chain director sits between €1,600 and €2,300. All figures are net, without travel expenses and VAT.

Why the budget is released in stages. A reliable total figure is rarely available at the start, because only the baseline shows where the money sits. The budget is therefore released stage by stage with an exit after each stage: first the baseline, then the decision on sequence and target state, then the support into routine operations. The value of that order lies less in the saving than in the comparison figure — after the first stage the effort stands next to a measured number: tied-up capital, freight spend, cost of shortages.

Where the arithmetic differs from a consultancy. Large supply chain consulting firms sell a team and an analysis phase; in a chain, though, the problem rarely sits in the analysis but in the weekly coordination round that has run the same way for years. Whoever wants to change that rhythm has to sit in it — in the planning meeting, in the supplier conversation, in the system migration. That is why you pay a few people at a higher individual rate instead of many at a mixed rate, and it is the point on which we differ from most supply chain consulting companies. What you do not get in exchange: an organization that carries a project when nobody internally has time for it.