Use Our ROI Calculator Disconnected WMS and TMS Systems Come with a Cost
The Cost Categories Nobody Talks About
Most operators we speak with have a vague sense that their current setup is inefficient. But “inefficient” becomes normal when you cannot attach a dollar figure to it.
Here are the five areas where a disconnected TMS and WMS system quietly drain your operation.
1. Dispatch and Routing - The Hidden Time Tax
If you have dispatchers on your team, a meaningful chunk of their day is being consumed by coordination calls, confirming stops, adjusting sequences, and inevitably chasing down delivery windows that your TMS didn’t automatically send to your WMS.
Our calculator uses a 12.5% midpoint – meaning roughly one in eight hours your dispatch team spends is pure coordination overhead that automation should be handling.
The math we use is straightforward: take your truck count, multiply by the estimated coordination time per route per year, and apply a 65% automation reduction.
We also cap it against your actual dispatcher headcount so the number stays honest.
On a fleet of 25 trucks with two dispatchers at a loaded office rate, that number can easily land north of $30,000.
As abstract as that sounds, that’s the amount per year that you’re over paying for employees to be on calls that an all-in-one TMS and WMS system like Grasshopper Labs handles automatically.
Beyond the cost, this also forces your dispatchers to work with one hand behind their back. When they spend a fifth of their day on calls, they have less time to focus on the exceptions that actually need human judgment.
In other words, you end up with your most experienced people doing clerical work.
2. Customer Service - Your Team Should Not Be a Status Update Machine
This one hits close to home for a lot of operators.
When your TMS and WMS are not integrated, your customer service team becomes the bridge between them.
A customer calls asking where their delivery is, your CS rep has to manually check the WMS to see what shipped, then pulls up the TMS to check where the driver is, then manually piece together an answer.
We estimate that routine status inquiries and exception management consume about 25% of each CS rep’s annual work time when systems are disconnected.
That is one full day per week, per rep, spent on questions that a customer portal or automated notification could answer instantly.
The formula in the calculator is simple: number of CS reps, times 25% of a 2,112-hour work year, times your loaded office rate.
For a team of three reps at $25/hr loaded, that is over $39,000 a year in labor being spent on something that should be automated.
3. Warehouse and WMS Automation - The Re-Entry Problem
Every time you manually move an order from your WMS to your TMS system, someone is touching data that should flow automatically.
Warehouse staff spend time on manual lookups, re-entry, and coordination tasks that exist entirely because the two systems do not share data.
From speaking with prospects about their operations, we put this at 15% of each warehouse employee’s annual hours.
That might sound conservative, and honestly for some operations it is.
If you are doing high-volume order processing and your team is constantly toggling between systems, copying tracking numbers, updating statuses by hand – 15% undersells it. But we wanted the calculator to be defensible, not dramatic.
The practical implication here is not just cost, it’s the error rate.
Manual re-entry is where order quantities go wrong, special handling notes disappear, and addresses are entered incorrectly.
The labor cost is real, but the downstream cost of those errors is often larger and even harder to measure.
4. Failed Deliveries - The Most Expensive Line Item
This is the one that gets people’s attention when they run the calculator.
We price a failed delivery at $175 per redelivery attempt. That covers driver time, fuel, vehicle overhead, the administrative cost of rescheduling, and the CS interaction that follows.
For big and bulky deliveries like furniture, appliances, fitness equipment, it can be significantly higher, but $175 is a reasonable floor.
Now multiply that by your monthly delivery volume, your current fail rate, and a 35% reduction from automated scheduling and proactive customer notifications.
For an operation running 2,000 deliveries a month at a 5% fail rate, that is 1,200 failed deliveries a year. At $175 each, you are looking at $210,000 in annual redelivery costs, and automated scheduling and SMS notifications can cut that by $73,500.
The fail rate input in the calculator is the one we encourage people to be as accurate as possible.
It’s easy to underreport because failed deliveries often get absorbed into the noise of daily operations. But if you pull your actual data from failed attempts, reschedules, “no access” notes – most operators find the number is higher than they thought.
5. Office Work Per Order - The 8-Minute Tax
This is the most unsexy cost category and also the one that is the hardest at scale.
Every single order that flows through a disconnected operation requires roughly 8 minutes of manual office processing: data entry, confirmations, status updates, and manual admin tasks that exist purely because two systems are not talking to each other.
Eight minutes sounds trivial. But at 2,000 deliveries a month, that is 16,000 minutes – over 266 hours – of manual work per month across your team.
At a $25/hr loaded rate, that is $6,700 a month, or about $80,000 a year, just in order-level administrative overhead. And that number scales linearly with your volume. Every new client you land, every route you add, the manual work load grows with it.
This is the cost that makes scaling painful. You add volume, you hire more admin staff. The unit economics never improve because the inefficiency is baked into the workflow of your systems.
Run Your Own Numbers
The calculator asks for a handful of inputs: your truck count, warehouse employee headcount, monthly delivery volume, fail rate, number of CS reps, dispatchers, and your loaded labor rates for warehouse and office staff.
From there it runs all five of the calculations above, subtracts the cost of a Grasshopper Labs subscription, and gives you an annual ROI number and payback period.
We’ll be upfront about the assumptions: we use a 2,112-hour work year, 22 delivery days per month, and the efficiency percentages I described above.
These are based on what we see across our customer base and industry benchmarks.
Your specific numbers will vary, but in our data, the calculator tends to be conservative.
The actual savings operators realize are usually higher once you account for the error reduction and the capacity it frees up for growth.
The part that surprises most people is the payback period. For most mid-sized operations – 15 to 50 trucks, a warehouse team of 8 to 20 – the payback period comes out somewhere between 2 and 5 months.
That means within a single quarter, the platform has paid for itself purely in recovered labour and reduced redelivery costs. Everything after that is margin.
Try the calculator yourself: grasshopperlabs.io/roi-calculator
What the Calculator Does Not Capture
We want to be honest about the limits here too, because it matters.
The calculator quantifies the operational costs that are easiest to model: labor, redeliveries, and per-order admin overhead.
What it does not capture is the revenue you are leaving on the table because your systems cannot scale cleanly, the clients you are at risk of losing because your customer experience is lagging, and the opportunity cost of having your best people doing manual work instead of building the business.
It also does not capture the cost of the integrations themselves. If you are running a WMS and TMS system separately, you’re probably paying for a middleware tool, a custom integration, or both.
That means you also have to manage the maintenance and breakage that comes with it.
That is real money that does not show up in your labor budget but absolutely shows up in your operational overhead.
The calculator gives you the floor. The real number is almost always higher.
The Point Is Not the Number - It Is the Conversation
When we talk to operators who are unsure about consolidating their systems, the most common thing we hear is some version of: “We know it is not ideal, but we have made it work.”
We get that. You build processes around your tools. Your team knows the workarounds. Change is disruptive.
But “making it work” has a cost, and most operators have not actually looked at what that cost is.
The calculator is designed to start that conversation.
If your operation is spending $150,000 a year on inefficiencies that a unified platform eliminates in two months, that is not a technology decision anymore. That is a business decision.
Run the numbers. See where you land. And if you want to walk through the results together, we are always happy to do that.