Author: Quentin de Roo, Head of MOOV Europe, MOOV Logistics

Every peak season tells the same story. Rolled containers, blank sailings, sky-high spot rates and costly expedites, no matter how solid the contracts looked back in spring.

Retail seems obsessed with the last mile, and rightfully so, because that is where the customer is watching. The first mile out of Asia barely gets a look, even though that is where most of those delays and hidden costs actually start.

For European retailers sourcing from Asia, the biggest OTIF (on-time, in-full) risk and the least protected money are created 10 to 12 weeks earlier in the chain, at PO placement, cargo-ready confirmation and the booking against your carrier contract. When goods arrive late at a European DC, the event that caused it usually happened weeks earlier.

How one slip at origin causes a multi-week tail at the DC

It starts when a supplier moves cargo-ready by a week. The next vessel on your contracted carrier is full, so the booking rolls. Carriers are more fluid than they used to be, faster to skip a port or drop a customer, so the allocation you planned around disappears. The promo arrives late or short and the DC has to deal with it.

Then the ripple keeps going. Unsold inventory clogs the DC, so incoming containers can’t be offloaded and port fees pile up. Back at origin, factories can’t ship the next wave because the warehouse there is still holding goods from the last one.

And that’s just the logistics side of it. When seasonal cargo misses its selling window it gets discounted, held over to next season or written off entirely, which hits your margins and your growth projections.

Based on data from multiple large European retailers we work with, we’ve estimated that for every 1,000 TEU a year of inbound volume, you can avoid around $1.9M in commercial loss just by lifting on-time arrival from 70% to 80%.

The hidden cost of a cheap container

A cheap container becomes expensive when 30% of the goods still arrive late. Rate per container is the usual benchmark, but the more useful question is how much of what you shipped actually arrived on time for the money you spent.

Annual contract-versus-spot mixes are rarely checked against how volume actually flows. For the large European retailers we start working with, rebalancing that mix onto a premium service can easily be worth roughly $70K per sailing. Cutting booked but unused capacity can save them about $1.2M a year. Raising container utilization from 85% to 92% around $2.7M a year, and bringing the air-freight share down from 2.5% to 1.5% adds another $5M.

With that much risk and cost concentrated in the first mile, why do so many retailers still struggle to improve inbound reliability?

A first mile without visibility

A while ago a VP of Operations at a large e-commerce aggregator with roughly a billion in revenue shared a major frustration with me:

“Our supply chain itself is solid. What we’re missing is visibility into what breaks. And we usually only find out two or three weeks after it already happened.”

His supplier had missed the agreed cargo-ready date, and he only heard about it two or three weeks later. By then the container had sailed, their customer was already running short of stock, and the whole team was firefighting a problem that was almost a month old. He had no idea what was actually going on at the other side of the world.

To find out whether a retailer really has visibility over its first mile, I ask three questions:

• How many of your POs missed cargo-ready by more than five days last quarter?
• Across all factories, by how much did booked quantities diverge from shipped quantities?
• When a container slipped, could you trace it back from the box on the water to the specific PO and supplier that caused it?

Most teams can’t answer any of them. Even with a visibility platform, what they see is usually the cargo-ready confirmation and the position of the vessel their container is supposed to be on. The 10 to 12 weeks before that container even existed stay dark.

Most platforms only carry data at the shipment level. In retail you need the whole chain: PO to supplier booking to carrier booking to container.

Visibility without control

A head of inbound logistics at a fashion e-commerce pure-player described something that we see often:

“I wouldn’t say we lack visibility. What we lack is full control on the supplier side, and that’s a big pain point for us.”

I hear visibility pitches all the time (I give a few myself), and most of them assume that once you can see your supply chain, you can also steer it. This person could see plenty. When a supplier moved a cargo-ready date, the new date showed up neatly in the system, and that was about all anyone on their side could do with it.

Their responsibility formally starts at the cargo-ready date. Everything before that (production planning, packing, a supplier juggling orders from customers bigger than you) sits outside their scope. So nobody on their side has the standing to call the factory and ask why the date moved, let alone hold them to the original promise.

Control without accountability

“I renamed our control tower the Shipping Tower, because it doesn’t actually control anything. Run an airport like that and you’d have planes crashing.”

The logistics director who said this worked for a multibillion-dollar manufacturer that had already invested heavily in dashboards and a dedicated team at origin. Those dashboards were green while customers were still waiting for orders that were supposedly fine. Responsibility was divided across buyers, logistics teams, regional offices, and external partners. Each group reported on its own part of the journey, so every KPI could look healthy without anyone owning the delivery promise all the way to the customer.

Nobody is measured on the only thing that counts: did the goods arrive when we promised?

A plane also passes between several controllers, but the pilot in command still owns the whole flight and every handoff is explicit. In this supply chain, responsibility disappeared into the handoffs.

Partial solutions, and what actually fixes this

If these accounts make one thing clear, it’s that while plenty of solutions promise to give you full visibility and control over your first mile, many don’t actually provide the real solution: being able to see exceptions coming before they become a problem and to act on them in real time and pro-actively so they don’t ripple through to the last mile.

It starts with one accountable owner across the whole chain, judged on the customer’s actual delivery date rather than each team’s own scorecard. Green should mean one thing only: the customer got what we promised, when we promised it.

That accountability should begin the day the supplier accepts the PO, not at the cargo-ready date, with a team at origin working on your behalf and staying close to every supplier. They confirm each PO milestone, keep the updates accurate, ask why a date moved and push to recover the schedule while there is still room.

Without people enforcing that discipline, a control tower has little to show. Once the updates are flowing, a potential slip reaches you as it happens, or even before, and the same team can step in while the exception is still avoidable or easier to fix. It’s less glamorous than another dashboard, I admit, but it’s what turns visibility into something you can act on.

Recovery also needs an option beyond standard carrier contracts, sky-high spot rates and air freight. Keep guaranteed space on a reliable premium ocean service where sailings leave as promised and 40 days means 40 days. But buying the space is only half the job. You have to manage that allocation continuously against actual PO readiness, contracted capacity and urgency. That means filling the space you already pay for and keeping enough regular volume on the premium service to keep the option alive. When the main carrier fails, urgent goods move into capacity that is already running. Done well, this improves reliability and cuts both unused capacity and your dependence on expensive spot or air expedites.

Then you can add intelligence. With enough data over time you can predict cargo-ready dates more accurately and book the right container in advance. A simple traffic light view shows which orders are on track and which need action, so the origin team can step in early along agreed SOPs. The hours that used to go into chasing updates go into fixing the slip instead.

Much more to improve

There is a lot more to say about making the stretch from PO to DC more reliable and less expensive. We didn’t even cover supplier and carrier performance management, demurrage and detention, invoice audit recovery, customs clearance automation and DC labor scheduling, to name a few. I’m happy to go deeper on any of those in a future article.