4 Reasons Your Manufacturing Logistics Tech Project Is Over Budget and Under-Delivering
Most logistics technology investments don’t fail at go-live. They fail months earlier, in a planning meeting where a vendor hands over a 14-week implementation timeline, and nobody pushes back. By the time the project is six months in with no end in sight, the damage is already done.
This is not an edge case. According to Gartner’s Logistics Functional Transformation Survey, 76% of logistics transformations fail to hit their critical success metrics. McKinsey research adds a sobering corollary: even implementations broadly deemed “successful” still lose approximately 20% of their projected value post-launch. And despite these persistent failure rates, 80% of logistics organizations have attempted four or more transformations in under five years, chasing ROI that keeps slipping just out of reach.
For an upper mid-market shipper with $200–300 million in freight spend, a botched TMS implementation typically amounts to a multi-million-dollar mistake in hard remediation costs alone, not counting lost revenue, delayed ROI, or change management rework. For large multinationals, that number scales into the tens of millions.
So, what keeps going wrong? Increasingly, organizations are recognizing that these failures don’t originate during implementation. They are rooted much earlier, during planning, during design, and in how success is defined before a project even begins.
The same four failure patterns appear again and again — and they are preventable, but only if you know to look for them before the project kicks off.
Read Manufacturing Tomorrow’s full article to learn the 4 reasons your manufacturing logistics tech project is over budget and under-delivering according to JBF’s CEO, Brad Forester.
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