For decades, our industry has built its procurement culture around a seductively simple metric: unit price. However, this narrow focus ignores the fragments and leaks that never appear on the purchase order—demurrage, idle equipment, duplicated overhead, coordination chaos. These aren't exceptions. They're features of the traditional model, dismissed as "the cost of doing business" until they quietly consume margins that should have been profit. It's time to question whether the math we've been using was ever correct.

The Utilisation Trap: Why Traditional Trucks Cost a Fortune

Traditional logistics charges you for the movement. The downtime—the truck idling for hours at the supply base gate, the driver waiting for paperwork, the empty return leg—is framed as the provider's problem. But here's the uncomfortable truth: that downtime gets priced into every future movement. It's your problem, only hidden.

The Demurrage Deception: The Cost We've Stopped Noticing

The traditional model treats demurrage as inevitable—a cost to be managed, not eliminated. But demurrage isn't an operational cost. It's a penalty for unscheduled logistics. And like all penalties, it's avoidable.

The Consolidated Alternative: Different Math, Different Results

Consolidated, scheduled trucking challenges every assumption of the traditional model—not through technology hype, but through intelligent scheduling, multi-client consolidation, and a simple refusal to pay for empty trucks. The math transforms because the model transforms: A single, scheduled logistics partner operating across multiple clients and movement types achieves overhead absorption that fragmented providers can't touch. One team serves dozens of movements. One scheduling platform optimises hundreds of trucks. One invoice replaces multiple invoices. Fixed costs are spread over productive hours, not idle waiting. The result isn't just cheaper trucking. It's leaner logistics. In an industry where margin compression is relentless, lean isn't a luxury. It's survival.

Building Logistics That Finally Works

Here's the paradox: We've optimised everything else in oil and gas. Drilling efficiency has transformed. Safety performance has improved exponentially. Digitalisation is everywhere—except in how we move trucks between supply bases and installations. Trucking proposals still focus on units, availability, and compliance checklists. They never address the demurrage, overhead, and inefficiency that determine true cost. So, what if we built logistics around utilisation instead of transactions? What if we challenged the transaction-centred model that has dominated for decades? In a scheduled, consolidated model:
  • Trucks move because slots exist, not because orders dropped unexpectedly
  • Capacity is shared among multiple clients, spreading costs without compromising service
  • Redundant overhead is eliminated—one compliance team, one scheduling platform, one invoice
  • Demurrage becomes exceptional, not expected
Documentation precedes movement. Loading bays are prepared for arrivals. Drivers operate on predictable schedules. The result isn't zero demurrage—but it’s measured in exceptions, not expectations.

The Equation That Matters

The shift from fragmented, unscheduled trucking to consolidated, scheduled logistics isn't about being modern or innovative. Those words are overused and underdelivered. It's about getting the equation right:
  • Higher utilisation lowers unit costs
  • Consolidated overhead eliminates redundancy
  • Scheduled movements make demurrage exceptional, not expected
  • Predictable logistics enables better planning everywhere

The Crucial Question: Is the Cost High Because of the Rate, or the Leak?

What if your trucking costs aren't high because rates are bad, but because utilisation is low, overhead is duplicated, and demurrage is normalised? What if the traditional model survives only because its true costs are distributed across departments, buried in P&L line items no one examines together? And most importantly, would you re-strategise your trucking if you could shift from buying individual truck movements to investing in scheduled logistics capacity?

The Conversation Continues

This isn't a question any single department can answer on its own. Procurement, finance, and operations must ask together because the answer determines not just logistics costs, but competitive positioning in an industry where every margin point matters. For a deeper exploration of how unscheduled movements became our default and what breaking the cycle requires, read our previous blog: Rethinking Unscheduled Trucking in Oil & Gas Supply Chains. Visit Altus’ Consolidated Trucking Service page for more info, and when you're ready to move from conversation to action, contact us to book your first scheduled movement.


The old math no longer adds up. The question is whether we're ready for new math that finally does.


Worker using a forklift to load goods onto the truck.