The evidence

We measure the saving. We don't assume it.

Most cubing ROI models multiply an assumed percentage by your freight spend. This one is the difference between two real runs of the engine over the same 200-order book — identical units and identical weight in both.

Measured physical delta between the naive baseline policy and the optimized policy over 200 orders
Measured over 200 orders	Naive baseline	Optimized	Delta
Cartons	3,417	3,341	0%
Corrugate m²	5,716	5,346	0%
Shipped m³	328.0	294.2	0%
Pallets fewest-pallets strategy	171	146	0%
Dunnage prescribed, liters	119,044	88,011	0%
Grade-C (weakest) cartons	1,207	790	0%
Units shipped like-for-like control	76,287	76,287	0
Total kg like-for-like control	71,150	71,150	0

↔ Scroll the table to see both runs

Pallet positions shipped · 200-order book 146 shipped 25 deleted

This is the integer step-function, drawn. Cube fell 10.3% — a proportional improvement — and because a pallet position is a whole thing that you either pay for or do not, it came out as 25 pallets that stopped existing. Identical units, identical weight, in both runs.

Carton count barely moves. Cube falls 10.3% and pallets fall 14.6%.

The win is not "fewer boxes." It is right-sized boxes cubing down into fewer pallet positions — the integer step-function appearing in real output. Weight is identical in both runs, which is what makes it a like-for-like comparison rather than a favorable one.

Caveat This is a 200-order synthetic grocery book, not a real customer file. The method transfers; the magnitudes have to be re-measured on your data. And the baseline is generous — it assumes you start from a single default shipper. If you already cube competently, the honest uplift is nearer 6% than 11%, and establishing which base you start from is the first question of any engagement.

At 100,000 outbound orders a year

$1.3M – $3.0M in hard cost depending on mode mix, plus roughly $0.5M – $0.9M in avoided compliance penalties and detention, and about 433 metric tons of CO₂e.

Sustainability composition mirrors the cost stack exactly: 89% of the carbon saving is transport, not packaging. A claim built on fiber reduction tells one-ninth of the story.

Mode determines everything. Qualify the LTL/TL mix before anyone quotes a number — the same physical improvement is worth 2.4× more on an LTL lane.

Evidence grading, applied to every figure on this page. A primary source — regulator, research institute, published tariff or regulation text. B named study, named case study or documented corporate policy. M measured — produced by executing the CubeRight engine and reproducible from the probe scripts. Nothing here is an assumed percentage, and where we corrected ourselves the correction stays on the record: void fill was mispriced by roughly 10× on the first pass, and parcel dim-weight was extrapolated linearly when carrier rate tables are stepped. Both are fixed and both are logged.