Industry: Transportation Product: Tamara Application: Route optimization
A global logistics operator set out to stand up a new multi-modal freight corridor from Asia to Europe — design the lane, contract carriers, fit out the ocean, rail and road legs in parallel, run an integration pilot, then go live. Treated as a delivery programme and scheduled the orthodox way, the roll-up gave a clean 430-day, October 2027 go-live. Carrier capacity was contracted against that single date and working capital committed to it — as if the corridor would stand up on one day rather than somewhere across a wide range of plausible days.
Rebuilt in Tamara, Vose Software's Monte Carlo project risk tool, with each activity carrying a Beta-PERT duration and six discrete operational risks on top, the go-live date resolves into a full distribution — and the published plan sits at its left edge, not its centre:
The body of the spread runs from a P10 of 494 days to a P90 of 654, centred on a P50 of 570 days (February 2028) with a mean of 573, against the 430-day plan. The probability of going live by that plan is just 1%, and the gap to the P80 go-live is 195 days — roughly 6.4 months of contingency the single date concealed.
The same simulation places every leg in time as a band, not a bar:
The three modal legs run side by side, and the integration pilot's whisker is the widest of all because it absorbs the spread of every leg feeding it. Whichever leg is slowest in a given iteration drives the merge, so the corridor inherits the worst of the three, not the average — which is exactly why the deterministic roll-up understates the date.
Plotting every activity by criticality index against cruciality gives the de-risk map; the top-right corner is where to spend first:
The integration & pilot run dominates (criticality 100%, cruciality 0.50) — the merge point that inherits all three legs — followed by ocean-leg port slots & handling (53%, 0.36) and customs & compliance setup (58%, 0.35), with service ramp & validation (100%, 0.28) and the rail-leg terminal & paths (33%, 0.26) behind. The action list is the integration pilot and the slowest modal leg, not whichever leg is easiest to expedite.
Every day to go-live ties up working capital and holds contracted carrier capacity idle, so a late corridor and an over-budget corridor tend to be the same corridor. Plotting each iteration on cost-versus-schedule axes shows the coupling:
The late-and-over-budget quadrant — past plan and above the $55M budget — holds 25% of all runs: a quarter of futures miss on both axes at once, because the same slow legs that push go-live out also burn the carry. Cost and schedule are one risk here, not two.
Six operational events were modelled as Bernoulli risks — port congestion, rail strikes, customs holds, fuel spikes, weather, IT slips. Ranking them by expected schedule impact (probability × delay) gives a clean Pareto:
Five of the six events carry ~80% of the expected discrete-event delay — port congestion / berth wait (4.2 weeks expected), a rail strike or path withdrawal (3.0), a customs/border hold (3.0), severe-weather route closure (2.7) and a control-tower IT slip (2.5), with a fuel-price spike (2.0) trailing. The largest strikes the ocean leg — the same leg the scatter flags — confirming where to bypass high-risk transit points. A mitigation package (priority-berth booking, a rail/road fallback, a fuel hedge and earlier IT integration) cuts the P80 go-live by 52 days (625 → 573) and drops the overrun probability from 25% to 3%, with the cost mean falling from $51M (P90 $59M) toward a P90 of $52M.
A new corridor is not a launch date; it is a distribution set by its slowest leg and its merge. Tamara is what turns "when can we go live?" into a probability operations and finance can both commit to.