Every truckload move needs four things: a driver, a truck, a trailer, and freight.
Everything else adds cost. That doesn’t make it unnecessary, but it does mean every additional service, platform, and provider should be able to clearly explain the value it creates. I have been saying that for most of my career.
Before joining KBX Logistics™, I spent 12 years in operations at a national truckload carrier. That experience taught me to evaluate freight from the ground up. The driver, the tractor, the trailer, and the miles carry the freight. Every dollar layered beyond this has to earn its place.
Over the two decades, and more rapidly over the last 7 years, a growing number of services, technologies, and intermediaries have emerged between the shipper and the truck. Most were created to solve a real problem, and many continue to deliver meaningful value. But over time, individual solutions can become permanent line items, long after anyone stops asking whether they’re still worth the cost.
Each of those services is another party to the transaction, and each must show what it adds.
KBX should be held to the same standard.
In fact, I regularly ask that question about our own business: What value do we create by standing between a shipper and the carrier moving the freight? If we cannot answer that clearly, we haven’t earned the right to be there.
Our job is simple: create enough value for our customer that working with KBX is better than managing that same network independently. And we take out the services in the chain that stopped adding enough value to hold their place.
Price is one of the things we add. Ease and peace of mind is another.
A shipper should find that going through KBX is easier than assembling the same coverage alone, and easier is a claim that you can check against your own team’s hours.
Shipment visibility is one of the clearest examples.
We can go directly to a carrier for status and keep third parties out of that exchange. When a company’s whole job is to carry a status message from the carrier to us and from us to a shipper, it’s charging to relay information that already exists.
Consolidation illustrates the opposite outcome.
Combining multiple LTL shipments into a truckload removes waste and lowers total transportation cost. In this case, the additional service creates more value than it consumes.
Shippers can apply this same exercise to their own networks.
List every party that touches a load, every platform, every service. Then, ask a simple question: What would we lose if this disappeared tomorrow?
Plenty of added services answer the question well, and the safety and compliance work answers it most often.
Cost reduction should never come at the expense of safety, compliance, or risk management, and I would not run this exercise looking for cuts. Some of what reads as overhead on an invoice is the reason a load arrives without a claim.
The driver, the truck, the trailer, and the load.
Everything else exists because someone believes it creates more value than it costs.
That includes KBX.
The moment we stop asking whether a service, technology, or provider is earning its place is the moment it starts becoming overhead instead of value.
I’d rather have that question asked of us every year than assume we’ve already answered it.
Tracy Reiss
SVP Transportation
KBX Logistics