THE INTEGRATION TAX
What is hand-connecting your systems costing you?
Your operations people spend part of every week moving information between systems that should already be talking to each other. Rekeying a load into a customer portal. Copying a rate out of an email. Chasing a status that a system already has. That time is a real cost, you pay it every year, and almost nobody has put a number on it. Three numbers you already know will.
Run your own numbers
Nothing is stored and nothing is sent anywhere. The result updates as you type.
Anyone who moves information between systems as part of the job. Dispatch, track and trace, carrier onboarding, billing.
Salary plus benefits, payroll taxes and overhead. Your finance team has this number.
Rekeying a load into a portal, copying a rate out of email, chasing a status a system already has.
Fill in all three fields. The number appears here as you type.
Your integration tax
$0
every year
- 0full-time people, doing this and nothing else
- 0hours a week, across the team
- $0over three years, undiscounted
Revenue you would have to add to earn the same money
$0
At a 5 to 8 percent operating margin, a dollar of cost removed does the work of about sixteen dollars of new revenue. Sixteen is the middle of that band. At an 8 percent margin it is twelve and a half. At 5 percent it is twenty.
What sits behind the number
How the math works
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Headcount, times fully loaded cost per person, times the share of the week that goes to hand-connecting systems. That is the whole calculation, and every number in the result comes out of those three inputs.
What it assumes
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A forty hour work week, used only to turn the percentage into hours. And no discounting on the three year figure, which is in today’s dollars. Adjust for either one if your numbers work differently.
What is deliberately not in it
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No savings percentage. No efficiency multiplier. No payback period. Every one of those needs a benchmark, and a benchmark you cannot inspect is a benchmark you cannot trust. This tool tells you what you are already spending and stops there.
Why it never shows up on a P&L
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It is not a line item, not a vendor, and not in the technology budget. It sits inside salaries you are already paying, spread thin enough across enough people that it never looks like a problem worth solving. That is what makes it a tax. You pay it every year whether or not you ever decide to.
What fragmentation costs
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The integration tax is what fragmentation costs. Every new system, portal and point tool adds another connection somebody has to keep alive by hand, so the work compounds faster than the technology does.
What connecting once changes
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Connect once means connecting the systems your first workflow needs, one time, and then running that workflow without a person sitting in the middle of it. Not every system you own, and not all at once. You pick the first workflow by the outcome you want from it.
The infrastructure behind the world’s largest 3PLs is now available to you. LSP44 started with 25 million dollars in revenue on day one, on a platform that already carries 80 of the top 100 logistics service providers.
Now put a number on the other side
You know what the integration tax costs you. The next question is what it takes to stop paying it, and that depends on which workflow you start with. Bring your number to a walkthrough and we will scope the first workflow with you.