Most logistics KPIs are about money. Late container, demurrage fees. Missed delivery window, penalty clause. Painful, but recoverable — reschedule, renegotiate, move on.
I manage logistics for a company that makes and distributes caskets, urns, and cremation products across Quebec. In this business, a late delivery doesn’t cost you a penalty. It costs a family their ceremony date. There’s no rescheduling a funeral because a supplier’s truck got stuck at a border crossing.
That constraint changes how you build a supply chain. A few things I’ve had to unlearn coming from general freight forwarding:
Buffer stock isn’t a cost center, it’s the product. In most freight, just-in-time is the goal — minimize inventory, minimize carrying cost, move fast. In funeral logistics, JIT is a liability. You carry stock you might not sell this month because the alternative is a family standing in a funeral home with nothing to bury their father in. The math on “efficiency” looks completely different when the downside of stockout isn’t a delayed shipment, it’s a service failure at the worst moment in someone’s life.
Customs delays hit differently. A held container of consumer goods sits in a warehouse racking up storage fees. A held container of caskets sits there while funeral homes are calling, rescheduling services, and burning goodwill with grieving families who have no idea why a box is stuck at a port. I’ve had to build customs documentation practices around this — cleaner HS codes, tighter pre-clearance paperwork, relationships with brokers who understand the urgency isn’t negotiable — because “we’ll sort it out next week” isn’t an answer anyone can give.
OTIF (on-time in-full) stops being a KPI on a dashboard and becomes the actual point of the job. I track it obsessively — currently running well above industry benchmarks for overland freight — not because a manager asked for a number, but because every percentage point below 100 is a real funeral that almost didn’t happen on time.
Here’s what surprised me most moving into this sector: the operational discipline required is higher than in general freight forwarding, not lower. Everyone assumes a niche, low-volume supply chain is simpler to run. It isn’t. It’s simpler in scale and brutal in tolerance for error.
If you work in freight, customs, or supply chain and have never had to plan around a deadline that can’t move, I’d be curious what you think the equivalent constraint is in your industry. Pharma cold chain? Event logistics? Something else?
Brahim Laatmani, CILT Affiliate Member – 1769