Molex™ manufactures electrical and fiber optic connectivity solutions for automotive, medical, industrial, and data communications applications.

For nearly a decade, Molex has worked with KBX Logistics™ to manage freight execution and improve transportation decision-making.

What started as a shipper + provider relationship with only 2 freight lanes has grown to more than 2,000 lanes. The relationship has evolved into a strategic relationship that is delivers a competitive advantage for Molex.

The Challenge:
High-Growth Markets Required a Stronger Model

As a global manufacturer serving demanding industries, Molex needed a transportation provider that could handle freight needs beyond transactional execution.

Molex operates in markets where demand and customer expectations are on the rise, most notably in the areas of AI-driven data center infrastructure, fiber optic connectivity solutions, and medical devices.

Molex needed a freight model that could scale with the business and a provider that could identify improvement opportunities across the supply chain.

The Solution:
From Lane Execution to Strategic Network Support

While KBX Logistics initially provided coverage for just 2 lanes, the relationship gradually expanded into a managed transportation relationship with over 20,000 truckload and LTL shipments annually, including lane planning, carrier coordination, execution, and regular network reviews.

With its perspective as a logistics provider grounded inside a shipper organization, KBX Logistics helped Molex evaluate freight beyond individual shipments. The team began analyzing network performance to find operational efficiencies and offer strategic recommendations.

The Impact:
Better Positioned to Serve Customer Demand

Molex gained a managed transportation structure capable of serving a growing customer base in high-demand markets.

With KBX Logistics performance analysis, Molex’s transportation decisions can now be reviewed with greater context, connecting cost, service, capacity, and future demand.

The KBX team insights are regularly shared with leadership, helping them connect freight performance to planning for the next stage of growth.

A Logistics Network Built for What’s Next

Molex needed a freight network that could scale with the business and strengthen planning at the leadership level.

The advantage they found with KBX Logistics represents not only 2,000 lanes, but also something greater: Molex’s ability to meet rising demand with a greater supply chain advantage.

The post From 2 Lanes to 2,000 Lanes. How Molex Built Freight Management for the Next Era of Connectivity appeared first on KBX.

Annoying, sure, but finance has figured out something supply chain still doesn’t always get credit for: executives trust the person who can call the number before the month closes, put a price on the risk, and explain what they want to do about it without dragging everyone through 14 slides of operational archaeology.

Freight is where a supply chain leader can prove all of that over and over again.

Every month gives you another shot to show that you saw the market turn coming, understood what it meant in dollars, made the right trade-offs, and kept the business close to plan anyway. Do that often enough and the conversation upstairs starts to change. 

That’s the path this article lays out: how supply chain leadership can use freight to build executive trust, what they need to start saying differently in the room, and why handing more day-to-day execution to a managed freight provider can be the move that finally gives them enough room to lead like an executive.

Why Does Supply Chain Leadership Have a Trust Problem at the Top?

Because supply chain too often shows executives what happened, while the functions with the most influence tell them what’s likely to happen next.

The CFO walks in with a forecast, a range of outcomes, and a dollar value attached to the risk. Supply chain often shows up later with the variance report and a solid explanation for why freight missed the plan. Both may be right, but only one is helping shape the decision before the money gets spent.

Atul Dighe, the Gartner analyst behind that trust research, summed it up in six words: “Influence is the currency of trust.” His advice, reported by SupplyChainBrain, was to bring fewer spreadsheets and tell a clearer story about business performance.

IMD made a similar argument: supply chain needs more pull at the executive level.

The way you get that is by moving the conversation forward in time. Instead of explaining last month’s overage, show what next quarter’s exposure could cost, where the assumptions are getting shaky, and what you’d do now.

That’s a lot harder when your month disappears putting out freight fires.

What Are the Five Steps for Supply Chain Leaders to Earn a Seat at the Executive Table?

If the trust problem starts with the supply chain showing up after the fact, the way out is to get into the conversation earlier and bring something the rest of the room can use.

Freight gives you a surprisingly good way to do it. You already have a live read on cost, capacity, service, and risk. The opportunity is to turn that operating knowledge into the language executives use to make decisions, then free up enough of your own time to keep doing it.

Here are five steps to change the conversation.

1. Start With the Numbers Your CFO Already Cares About

Your CFO probably doesn’t care that linehaul is up 8 cents a mile. They care that margin is getting thinner and want to know why.

Freight has plenty of answers hiding in plain sight: detention at the same DC every week, accessorials nobody cleans up, expedites caused by missed appointments, claims that drag on for months. Look at those as isolated transportation problems, and you’ll spend your life shaving pennies off rates. Add them up, and you’ve got a margin problem.

That’s the conversation worth having.

The CSCMP State of Logistics Report puts U.S. logistics costs at 7.8% of GDP, while Grant Thornton found 28% of CFOs aren’t planning cost cuts at all. They’re looking for better economics.

Bring them the total-cost view, not another rate sheet.

2. Call the Freight Market Before It Calls You

Anyone can explain a bad month once it’s over. Executive credibility starts to build when you can tell the room what’s coming, what it could cost, and what you plan to do if you’re right.

Truckload offered a pretty clean example this year. 

Capacity had been draining out of the market throughout 2025, so the June tightening didn’t exactly fall out of the sky. ACT Research had spot rates excluding fuel up 43% year over year, while Transport Topics reported routing guides that had held for three years starting to crack as freight spilled into spot.

The useful forecast isn’t “rates look like they’re going up.” Everybody can nod at that and go back to lunch.

Give the room a range, a trigger, and a move: “If tender rejections stay above 14% through October, we expect Q4 truckload to run 6% to 9% over plan. If they do, we move our three worst lanes to dedicated.”

Now your CFO can model something, your CEO can make a decision, and you’ve turned a freight opinion into a business input.

3. Bring the Build-Versus-Buy Case Before Someone Hands You Another Headcount Requisition

The reflex when a small transportation team gets buried is pretty predictable: hire another transportation manager.

Sometimes that’s the right answer. Just don’t let it be the only answer on the slide.

ATRI’s 2026 benchmark put the cost of operating a truck at a record $2.336 per mile while truckload carrier margins remained below 1%. There’s only so much value a three-person team can squeeze out by calling the same carriers harder. At some point, you’re negotiating with numbers, and numbers have an irritatingly good record.

So put the alternatives in business terms instead.

Gartner now coaches supply chain officers to frame these decisions as investments with returns finance can model. Do exactly that. Show the fixed cost of adding people as volume grows, then put it next to the variable cost of shifting execution to managed freight.

One slide can change the tenor of the whole conversation. The ROI case becomes visible, the 3PL-versus-in-house decision becomes a capital-allocation discussion, and you may discover that a bigger team wasn’t really what you needed in the first place.

4. Put a Dollar Figure on Freight Risk

Executives hear the word “risk” all day, so telling them carrier risk is elevated or theft is getting worse won’t move much. Put a dollar figure next to it, though, and now you’ve got their attention.

That’s where freight gives you an opening. KPMG’s 2026 outlook says boards are looking harder at how quickly companies spot a disruption, respond to it, and recover. Carrier vetting, hazmat exposure, cargo theft, and service failures all fit neatly into that conversation if you can show what each one could cost the business.

The Supreme Court’s Montgomery ruling put carrier selection back under the microscope, while Inbound Logistics reported cargo theft up 60% last year. Saying “we’re monitoring both” is fine if your goal is to end the discussion quickly.

A better move is to walk in with the exposure, the odds, and what you’re doing to shrink both.

Then, show that the plan works outside PowerPoint. When Hurricane Milton came through, DEPCOM Power’s shipment still moved. That’s the kind of resilience story an executive team can use.

5. Get Out of Enough Daily Freight Execution to Do the First Four

This is the step that makes the other four possible.

You can know exactly how to talk to the CFO, forecast the market, price the risk, and build the business case, but none of it helps much if your calendar still belongs to rejected tenders, appointment changes, check calls, and somebody asking where a truck is.

At some point, a VP or director has to decide which freight work still needs to sit on their desk and which freight work simply needs to get done well.

That’s the real value of managed freight. You’re not outsourcing judgment. You’re taking repetitive execution off the team so the people with the best view of the network can spend more time on the decisions only they can make.

A Blue Yonder survey found that only 20% of supply chain leaders could respond to a geopolitical shock within 24 hours. No surprise there if the same leader who should be deciding what to do about the disruption is still getting dragged into the load-by-load work underneath it.

A true freight management provider lets you scale transportation without scaling cost.

Freight Outcomes Are the Shortest Path to the Executive Table

If you want more influence upstairs, freight gives you plenty of chances to earn it. Every month you get to prove whether you saw the market coming, understood the risk, protected the budget, and made a smart call before somebody in finance had to explain the damage afterward.

The hard part is doing that while your team is buried in the daily work freight happily creates for you.

KBX Logistics™ knows both sides of that problem because we’ve run freight for Georgia-Pacific™ since 1919. Today, that means more than $2.5 billion in annual freight and roughly 8,000 loads a day. We were built by a shipper, which means our instinct is to improve the network the same way we would if the freight were ours.

Sometimes that means finding a backhaul everyone else missed. Sometimes it means helping Georgia-Pacific cut shipping costs 57%. Either way, those are the kinds of freight outcomes that change how a supply chain leader is seen upstairs.

If you want to know where your opportunities are hiding, bring us your five worst lanes. We’re happy to start the conversation there.

The post How Supply Chain Leaders Earn a Seat at the Executive Table appeared first on KBX.

Three years ago, KBX Logistics™ was looking for someone to step in and lead transportation. I was the company’s CIO at the time, and I had no intention of applying.

However, my boss at the time challenged me with a simple question: Where could I make the greatest impact on technology adoption at KBX, by leading transportation or by remaining in IT?

I told him to please stop using logic when arguing with me… then I took the job.

Technology determines how well a freight company operates. Access to data determines how well that technology performs. I believed that as the CIO, and I believe it to this day.

It’s how I lead transportation for KBX.

The data I mean is practical and immediate: where a truck is right now, what a lane costs today, which carriers performed best last quarter, and what a customer shipped last month.

My planners have to pull all of it into whatever they work in, our transportation management system or a planning model or a spreadsheet, and pull it fast enough to change a decision before the load moves.

I came into the role with 3 perspectives that shape how I view freight technology today. 

1. I spent 12 years in operations at a large national truckload carrier, so I know what a carrier can absorb and what a carrier walks away from.
2. I spent 11 years as KBX’s CIO, so I know what an integration costs, how critical architecture and security are to viability, and which systems buckle under volume.
3. I have spent the last 3 years running transportation, so I am responsible for the outcome.

Making technology work at a managed transportation provider takes all three at once: the carriers who move the freight, the systems that plan it, and the freight itself. 

Ignore any one of them, and you’re likely investing in technology that never delivers its promised value.

Not surprisingly, AI comes up in nearly every conversation I have with shippers today. My response usually starts with a question rather than an answer. That being: What problem are we solving?

When people ask about AI, most of them are really asking about AI agents. The conversation moved from large language models to agents in the last year. The biggest mistake I see shippers making is adopting an agent when there is a simpler, less costly way, simply because everyone else is talking about one.

In many cases, a well-designed API, an existing integration, or even a simple automation can solve the problem more efficiently. The goal is not to use AI simply to use AI. The goal is to solve the problem. We recommend picking a tool that fits the problem.

Industry research points to the same reality. This year’s State of Logistics Report added a section on AI in logistics and found adoption remains uneven: real returns in specific, well-defined applications, and a wide gap between companies running AI in core workflows and those still running isolated pilots.

That matches what I see across our customers and our carriers.

None of which makes KBX slow to use the tools. Our teams use AI tools every day for their own tasks because they make work faster and better. Deploying AI inside the products and services our customers rely on is a different decision entirely, and it requires a much higher standard of proof.

Freight adopts proven technology years late, and the delay usually traces to data rather than to the technology.

We ran LTL APIs in 2014, initially through a vendor, and by 2016 we connected directly with every major carrier that could hold a conversation about APIs, putting our shipment status in our own hands. The technology was ready in 2014. Carrier systems caught up years later.

We’ve seen this cycle before.

Blockchain arrived with enormous expectations and faded before achieving widespread adoption. Even today, the industry is still working through basic digitization challenges such as electronic bills of lading.

The Digital LTL Council published a common eBOL standard and asked carriers and 3PLs to sign pledges committing to adopt it by July 2023. Adoption remains incomplete.

Shippers ask me a version of the same question at the start of every engagement: Is our problem the data or the technology?

My answer is always the same: it’s both.

Data and technology create value together, and weaknesses in either one, limits the other.

Technology running on bad data produces confident, wrong answers. Technology also repairs bad data, standardizing formats and filling gaps, but only after the data lands somewhere we can query: a data warehouse, a cloud database, an API endpoint we can call. Data locked inside a system without open access to other systems and tools stays out of reach, and unleverageable.

Carriers are where that gap matters most, and carrier connectivity remains one of the industry’s biggest challenges.

Every transportation decision depends on information moving reliably between shippers, carriers, and technology platforms. Many large carriers still run AS/400 systems, many on prem. Those systems work, but they were built long before anyone expected a 3PL to need ubiquitous access to that data. We need carrier data as reliably as we get customer data, in a form we can hand to a shipper. Closing that gap takes years of integration work, one carrier at a time, and the industry is partway through it.

The cost of that work is what stalls shippers. A midsized shipper can name the tools it wants and still not justify the integration bill for each one, which is how a piecemeal stack turns into a tax on a small team. One TMS handling every need for a midsized shipper is mostly a thing of the past. Specialized systems, integrated behind the scenes, replaced it. KBX carries those integrations for our customers because we built them once and reuse them.

So I took the transportation job because the challenge in freight technology changed. 

Buying software is no longer the hard part. Connecting reliable data to the right problem, and then turning that information into better decisions, is where value is created today.

The technology matters. But the decisions that change cost, service, and resilience happen where the freight moves.

I’d rather own and manage those decisions versus merely advising on them.

Tracy Reiss
SVP Transportation
KBX Logistics

The post Why I Left the CIO Seat to Run Transportation appeared first on KBX.

Maybe Memphis to Dallas went for $2.04 a mile while everyone else was around $2.20. Back in February, that looked like a clean win. You locked in the low rate, booked the savings, and moved on.

Then the market moved.

A few months later, that carrier has better-paying freight to chase, and your $2.04 lane starts getting passed over. Now the planners are covering rejected tenders on the spot market, paying more for freight that was supposedly already bought cheap.

By June, FreightWaves was reporting that contract rates from this bid season weren’t holding, which tells you plenty about how quickly the old playbook has started to crack.

Lowest-bid freight procurement worked for years because the market gave shippers room to get away with it. But that room is disappearing, and five current trends explain why cheap freight today can look a lot more costly tomorrow.

The Truck Surplus Is Gone

The first crack in the lowest-bid playbook was simple: all those spare trucks disappeared.

Back in 2023, a rejected load barely qualified as a problem. Your coordinator called a broker, found another truck at or below contract, and kept moving because the truckload market had more capacity than it knew what to do with. Paying extra for reliability could feel like buying insurance on a toaster.

But of course, three lean years changed the equation. Roughly 89,000 carriers exited trucking, while tighter non-domiciled driver rules threaten to remove even more capacity.

Tender rejections add even more context to the story. They hovered near 5% through the downturn, then hit 14.3% in early February.

In other words, one in every seven loads was already getting turned down when that shiny $2.04 Memphis award went out.

The backup truck baked into the bid wasn’t waiting anymore.

When Spot Beats Contract, Lowest Bids Get Rejected First

Once that backup truck disappeared, carriers got pickier about what freight moved on the truck they had.

A dispatcher staring at more loads than trucks is going to notice when your $2.04 Memphis contract is sitting next to better-paying freight. Early last year, contract rates still beat spot by about 39 cents a mile. By March, that cushion was down to 11 cents, and in June, dry van spot passed contract for the first time since 2022.

That’s where the bargain starts getting expensive. If one in three Memphis loads bounces to a $3.40 spot cover, your $2.04 award really costs $2.49 a mile, 29 cents above the bids you rejected.

The savings slide still says you won 16 cents. The P&L has a less sentimental view, which is exactly how cost per load can look fine while total cost bleeds.

Record Carrier Costs Set a Floor Under Every Freight Bid

Even if your $2.04 carrier keeps accepting the load, there’s another problem: somebody still has to make money hauling it.

ATRI puts the 2025 cost of running a truck at $2.336 a mile, while truckload margins fell below 1%. 

Then, diesel went berserk, hitting $6.28 a gallon in September before passing $6.50.

Fuel surcharges help, eventually. The carrier still buys the diesel today and waits for you to pay the invoice. For a small fleet already running on fumes financially, that wait matters.

Which brings us back to Memphis. 

If one carrier is offering $2.04 when everyone else wants $2.20, there’d better be a good reason. Maybe it has a perfect Dallas backhaul. Without one, you may have found a bargain, or you may have found a carrier that priced the risk wrong.

Montgomery and Cargo Fraud Made Carrier Vetting a Procurement Issue

Here’s where the cheap rate can get genuinely expensive.

If your Memphis carrier walks on Friday, and Dallas still wants the load Monday, somebody has to find a replacement fast. Cargo thieves know exactly what that kind of Friday afternoon panic looks like. The FBI put 2025 cargo theft at nearly $725 million, while CargoNet logged $304.6 million in losses in Q2 alone.

Your legal exposure got more complex too.

In May, the Supreme Court’s Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II ruling left brokers open to negligent-hiring claims over carrier selection.

So carrier vetting can’t be the thing somebody remembers at 4 p.m. after the cheapest option bails. Price-only freight procurement pushes already elevated risk downstream.

We publish our carrier qualification requirements, and we believe that in your next RFP, you should ask every bidder to do the same.

A 12-Month Rate Can’t Survive a Market Repricing Weekly

Even a well-vetted carrier can’t make a February rate behave forever.

That $2.04 Memphis award was set when diesel was around $3.50. Since then, fuel jumped, trade policy kept changing, and lane economics moved right along with it. The cheapest bid had the least room to absorb any of that.

You can already see annual pricing starting to strain. Cass says contract rates are adjusting higher midyear, while CSCMP describes truckload as a collection of lane-level markets.

That’s the final problem with lowest-bid freight procurement. You’re pricing September freight with February assumptions.

Keeping up means treating freight as a variable cost and having options like rail and intermodal ready when a lane stops behaving.

What Comes After Lowest-Bid Freight Procurement?

Five trends later, we’re back where we started with that $2.04 Memphis lane. It looked great in February. But by September, the only number anyone cares about is what it really cost after the rejected tenders, spot recoveries, carrier headaches, and hours spent keeping the freight moving.

Freight procurement has to account for that whole year, which is also why the relationship behind the rate matters more when the market gets ugly.

KBX Logistics™ learned freight from inside of Koch Inc., managing Koch’s own transportation spend. If we made a bad call, there was nowhere to hide it and nobody downstream to hand the bill to. You learned to find the backhaul, change the mode, rethink the lane, or solve whatever problem showed up next.

That same approach helped Georgia-Pacific™ cut conveyor shipping costs 57% and got DEPCOM’s critical shipment to Puerto Rico with Hurricane Milton bearing down.

Before another low number wins on sight, put your finalists through these six questions and send us the bid sheet. Memphis included. We want to know what that $2.04 costs once the truck has to show up.

The post Why “Lowest Bid Wins” Stopped Working  appeared first on KBX.

A TMS vendor, a carrier vetting service, a load board and rate data subscription, and a handful of others that he’d stopped bothering to name.

“Piecemeal” was his word for it, and he wasn’t very cheerful when he said it.

We’ve heard a similar version of that story a lot lately, and our thoughts remain the same. Keep the TMS you’ve got and let us surround it.

Hand the other jobs to a single but strategic logistics provider, then let everything report back into the system your team already knows, and get your people out of browser tabs and back on the phone with carriers.

The rest of this article describes how that works, and how to tell whether your 3PL across the table actually lives by that philosophy.

Do You Need to Replace Your TMS to Use a 3PL?

No, and you never did.

A managed freight provider that knows its business can plug into whatever you’re running. Your loads still start in your TMS; they go out over EDI or API, and every status update and invoice comes back to the same screens your planners already have open.

Nothing gets rekeyed, and nobody spends a quarter rebuilding three years of rate history somewhere new.

So why does the migration pitch keep showing up?

Because it works for the 3PL. Once your lanes and history live in their software, leaving that provider often means starting over, and a customer who can’t leave is prone to stop negotiating. That’s a retention strategy, which is fine, as long as everyone in the room admits whose retention we’re talking about.

If the TMS is Fine, What’s Broken?

Everything you bolted onto it, and the fact that you’re the glue holding all of it together.

That’s how the transportation technology “junk drawer” gets built, one sensible purchase at a time.

You added a visibility tool because the TMS tracking ran a day behind. You picked up carrier vetting after a carrier with a stolen MC number took a load and vanished. Benchmarking came along the year the CFO wanted to know why freight was up 11%.

Each one solved a real problem on the day you bought it.

Stack them up, though, and what you’ve got is six logins that don’t share data and one transportation manager doing the integration by hand. That’s you, reconciling four versions of “on time” every Monday morning because your tools can’t agree on what the word “on time” means.

What’s the Junk Drawer Really Costing You?

Two things the subscription invoices don’t show: freight you lose to fraud, and hours you lose to babysitting these tools.

Fraud first, since that’s the one that ends up in a police report. Cargo thieves took close to $725 million in freight last year, up 60%, and the fastest-growing trick is impersonating a real carrier, website, and MC number included.

The junk drawer makes that easier. Your vetting lives in one tool and your tendering in another, so the identity check and the truck release happen in two different places. Thieves know that, and they’ve built a business around it.

The hours, however, are harder to see, so go count them.

Pick a load that shipped last Tuesday and follow it from order to paid invoice. Tally every system it touched and every email that started with “any update on this?” Multiply by a week of loads.

Run the Tuesday test, and the answer is a full-time job your company never hired for. 

Your team’s doing it anyway… it just happens to be in-between the jobs they were actually hired for.

What Changes When a 3PL Surrounds Your Shipper TMS?

Not much on your side. What changes is who picks up the phone.

You’ll notice first that the phone rings a lot less. Tenders leave your TMS, but they come to us, and we cover them with carriers that we’ve vetted.

When a truck no-shows at 3 p.m., we chase it, and your planner finds out from a status update instead of a receiver.

Then the Monday meeting gets shorter. Bids and benchmarks land in your TMS, along with the backhaul we found for you, so the argument’s over one set of numbers instead of four.

That’s what “orchestration layer” means: your TMS runs the day, and we run everything around it.

Could software do our part? Some of it.

The AI agents that Gartner is talking up will tender and re-tender faster than any planner, until something gets rejected twice. Then you’ve got a load no one wants, and moving it takes a person who knows the carrier’s dispatcher well enough to ask a favor, or which yardmaster to call when a railcar’s stuck.

That part was never software, and it’s the part you’re handing us.

How Do You Know a 3PL Won’t Pull the Same Move on You?

Run this test. Ask three questions before you sign with a 3PL, and pay attention to how they answer them.

First, whose system owns your loads on day one? The right answer is yours, in the contract, and you should make them prove it works: a live EDI or API link pushing real loads through a TMS like yours, with your IT lead watching. If the answer is theirs, you’re likely buying a migration with a sales rep attached.

Second, what’s included now, and what turns into its own invoice in year two? If visibility or benchmarking shows up later as an add-on, the junk drawer’s coming back with a new logo.

Third, what happens to your lane history and rate data if you leave? A provider who plans to earn the renewal hands it back without blinking. One who plans to keep you hostage positions itself for hedging, and the expected hedge is your answer.

A confident 3PL gets through all three in minutes. The other kind starts talking about their roadmap.

Why Would KBX Logistics Tell You to Keep Your TMS?

Because we were the shipper for nearly a century before we were anyone’s 3PL, and a shipper knows what a working system is worth.

KBX Logistics™ started as Georgia-Pacific’s freight department, moving 8,000+ loads a day with the tools we built for ourselves. Most of that century, there was no outside customer to lock in, so the whole operation was designed to move freight efficiently.

It’s why the three questions are easy for us. 

Your TMS stays the system of record. Visibility, benchmarking, bids, and carrier vetting come in the same agreement. Your lane and rate data stay yours.

That’s also how Georgia-Pacific got a 57% cut on conveyor shipping. The first loads on an Oregon mill project arrived with torn tarps and the budget was about to blow, so we swapped flatbeds for Conestogas and put a project manager on site. No platform made that call, and the same people got DEPCOM Power’s cargo through Hurricane Milton.

So run the Tuesday test. If the number bothers you, bring it to us with the TMS you like, and we’ll show you what belongs around it.

Bring us your Tuesday number →

The post Surround Your TMS, Don’t Replace It appeared first on KBX.

A friend of mine wanted to put a new roof on his house. It was leaking, and his plan was a hail-damage claim with his insurance provider.

I asked how old the roof was: 14 years. The warranty on a roof like his runs about 15, so the roof was already at the end of its life, and he was asking his insurer to buy him a new one.

He’d also been complaining that his premiums kept climbing. Multiply his claim by every homeowner retiring an old roof the same way, and the mystery of the rising premium solves itself. Everybody pays for the roof.

Transportation just got its version of that math.

A jury handed one of the industry’s largest brokers a $604 million verdict over how a carrier was selected. A company that pays a judgment like that recovers it in its rates. Its insurer recovers it across everyone’s premiums. And the carriers and brokers who never had a claim watch their own insurance climb anyway, the same way my relative’s neighbors will quietly pay for his shingles. It all goes up together.

I’ll tell you where liability actually sits in the conversations about the most critical topics we have with shippers: between fifth and tenth on the list. Everyone wants the protections. Nobody leads with them. What keeps people up is getting product on a truck and onto the shelf, and the market is making that harder by the quarter.

The headlines with the Montgomery case are doing their job; and this year’s industry cost reports put trucking’s operating costs at record levels. Spot rates have climbed with them, capacity continues to thin, and demand has stayed roughly flat.

In addition to the normal market fluctuations, the case set a precedent this industry has never had to price in, and you can hear this realization in conversations now: Uh-oh, there may be something there. Minds catch up to math eventually.

Play that math forward, and the carrier base changes shape. Compliance costs money, and at the low end of the market, those costs will likely run some operators out. The ones who survive will carry their own sets of requirements and protections.

The question I’d put to any of them is simple: Do these protections cover just you, or you and the shipper you’re working for?

So yes, RFPs should get more stringent, and they will. I challenge shippers to ask how rigorous a provider’s carrier-selection process actually is.

Ask what their compliance record looks like, and who checks it. Ask whether their protections safeguard your product, your brand, and your name. You’ll never get to 100% because exceptions happen. The job is stacking everything you can control toward it. And if you’re a shipper who isn’t doing that vetting today, take a hard look in the mirror, because nobody wants to carry this kind of liability unprotected.

KBX Logistics™ has had a head start on this one, building a disciplined carrier vetting process years before these headlines arrived. It runs in the background of every load, which is exactly where you want it: doing its job, so you can do yours.

The premiums are coming for the whole industry either way. The costs everyone creates, everyone shares. What you control is who touches your freight and how seriously they take protecting the name on the box.

From the seat: Ask whether a provider’s protections cover just them or them and you.

Next time: The freight nobody else wants. Hazmat, bulk, and oversized, and why the hard freight is the freight we like.

Annant Patel
Chief Commercial Officer & Asset Strategy Leader
KBX Logistics

The post Everybody Pays for the Roof appeared first on KBX.

I’ve bought the enterprise tech stack, and I’ve watched a mid-size shipper run the same job on a spreadsheet.

Both are paying a tax. It just shows up on different lines.

The large shipper version I lived. The enterprise TMS platforms. Your Oracles, your Manhattans, your Blue Yonders. These are serious systems, and they can be rigid. The contract decides how much flexibility you actually own. Adding a new tool means service fees. Even reaching your own data can turn into a project, and bringing something new inside the firewall has the potential to be a fight that starts with whether you can extract your own information at all.

The mid-market version runs on email, the phone, a group chat, and a spreadsheet one person understands. Maybe a point solution or two that don’t talk to each other. I won’t knock it. Manual is where plenty of growing companies start, and nobody plans to stay there.

The expensive part of both worlds is the same: the seams.

Wiring a provider into your business is never a one-time integration. It’s the shipment order. It’s order, shipment, status,  and a slew of others before any of it works as one thing and creates value.

The seam creates a hidden tax across the organization. IT has to dedicate resources to building, securing, and maintaining integrations alongside every other priority on its roadmap.

At the same time, business teams are left gathering data, defining requirements, and managing the exceptions that disconnected systems create. For companies implementing a new provider for the first time, both costs arrive before a single dollar of value is realized.

The industry has mostly made peace with that tax. The standard runway for a new provider integration is 6 to 12 weeks, and I’ve seen it stretch to +6 months.

We’ve demonstrated we can do it in less than 4 weeks because we’ve built the connection once, one-to-many: connect with KBX TM™ one time, and our network opens up. Security is wrapped in from the start, which matters more every month as AI models multiply.

Speed is worth real money, because the clock on value starts at connection. Every week an integration drags on is a week the savings you signed up for doesn’t exist yet.

Technology alone won’t win this for anybody, though, and I want to be honest about that. Tech in transportation is table stakes now. It’s the cell phone. Everybody has one; nobody wins because of it, and you’d notice fast if someone didn’t. 

What moves the game is the expertise at the top: knowing which tool earns a place in the stack, what good looks like, and what to do when an exception hits.

So, our answer is enterprise thinking sized for the mid-market.

We run the stack we built ourselves and proved on our own freight inside of Koch Inc. We bring the subject-matter expertise first, because moving product is the business we’re in, and we let the technology handle the daily grind: pricing, booking, tracking, the exception queue. You get to leverage the tech stack we built without the carrying costs of it.

And if the fit isn’t there yet, the honest move is to say so early. When the value doesn’t work for both sides, part ways before anyone spends real money, because the opportunity cost runs high in both directions. 

The manual start is fine. Growth makes the conversation about digitizing easy, and I’ve never met anyone who wants to stay manual.

From the seat: Everybody has the phone. Expertise decides who wins.

Next time: Everybody pays for the roof. A record liability verdict, record trucking costs, and what both mean for your carrier network and your next RFP.

Annant Patel
Chief Commercial Officer & Asset Strategy Leader
KBX Logistics

The post The Piecemeal Stack Is a Tax on Your Team appeared first on KBX.

KBX Logistics™ exists because Koch Inc. asked one question about its own freight team: Why are we only doing this for Georgia-Pacific™?

Koch builds businesses around capabilities. Figure out what you’re actually good at, invest in it, lean on it hard. KBX started as Georgia-Pacific’s transportation group, and we were giving GP a real competitive advantage, so that question answered itself. The job grew from one Koch company to the entire portfolio of internal companies.

That was the first build-vs.-buy decision anyone ever made about us, and the buyers were our own sister companies.

You’ll face the same decision eventually. Freight keeps growing until the choice lands on a desk: post another job req. for a freight hire or hand the function to a specialist.

My test is core competency.

If you manufacture baseball bats, your competitive edge lives in producing baseball bats. That’s where your R&D dollars belong. That’s where your best people belong. And that’s where your management attention belongs. A transportation department built on the side gets the leftovers of all three, and it competes against providers who are doing freight as their entire business.

In practice, the call to a company like ours comes up when costs jump. Fair. That’s usually the trigger…and the market is poised to supply plenty of triggers.

The long stretch of cheap trucks is likely ending.

Carriers spent years hauling at rates that didn’t pay them. Capacity is thinning, and the shippers whose whole playbook was finding the bottom of the spot market are discovering that the bottom has moved.

Cycles will keep coming, both up & down.

What you’re actually buying in KBX is a partner that provides consistency across all of them. This year’s State of Logistics Report put it right in the title, “Forged in Disruption,” and that’s the honest read on the era: disruption is the standing condition. A partner who earns their keep in both halves of the cycle is how you stop relearning freight at every turn of the market.

Comfort with a supplier can cut both ways, and I want to be straight about that. Comfort that turns into autopilot costs you money.

The good kind is built on incentives that point the same direction and accountability that runs both ways. Hold your partner accountable, and expect them to hold you accountable right back.

In the last issue I said supply chain is a cost center inside your own company.

Your partner should treat it differently.

The good ones bring the problem to you early: you’re doing this, it’s causing that, and if we change this piece, here’s what we think will happen. Then you run the experiment. Not every idea is great. Experiments find the ones that are great without betting the network on a hunch. It’s the same experimental discovery I wrote about in the first issue, pointed at your freight.

So, build where you’re the expert, and buy where someone else is.

If baseball bats are the business, put your best people focused on the baseball bat, and put your freight with a team that answers for outcomes the way your own department would. Ours did.

Georgia-Pacific built us, and everyone else gets access to what that build produced.

From the seat: Put your best people on the thing you actually sell.

Next time: The piecemeal stack. A TMS here, a visibility tool there, a vetting vendor somewhere else, and your team paying a quiet tax to hold it all together.

Annant Patel
Chief Commercial Officer & Asset Strategy Leader
KBX Logistics

The post The Build-vs.-Buy Moment: When to Stop Hiring Freight People appeared first on KBX.

Until the market shifts, and volumes back off.

Now you’re carrying the salary, the systems, the management layer, and everything else that came with solving a temporary workload problem permanently. Do that often enough and you’ll end up running a freight department built for your peak month(s) of the year.

That’s where we have seen a lot of companies get freight costs wrong. They beat carriers up over rates while leaving their own operating model untouched.

We ran freight inside of Koch long before offering freight management solutions to outside companies. So we’re familiar with this.

From our experience, if you want to turn freight into a variable cost, you must start by asking a more difficult question:

What work truly belongs on your payroll, and what are you paying to own year-round simply because you’ve always done it that way?

What Part of Your Freight Bill Is Actually Fixed Overhead?

If you want to know how much of your freight operation is truly fixed, don’t start with carrier rates. Start with everything you’re still paying for when volume drops.

That means the planners, the TMS, the integrations, the vetting tools, the benchmarking subscriptions, and the contracts that renew whether you move 4,000 loads or 2,000.

Most companies don’t see that number clearly because the costs are scattered across different budgets. Operations carries payroll. IT carries software. Procurement owns the rest. Each expense looks reasonable on its own, so nobody spends much time looking at what they add up to together.

But they add up quickly. 

Logistics pay now averages $126,400, and the license itself can be only about a quarter of a TMS’s total cost, before integration work starts piling on.

Why Is Fixed Freight Overhead Riskier Now Than It Was in 2023?

Back in 2023, you could get away with carrying more freight overhead because the market was unusually forgiving. Capacity was everywhere, spot rates were soft, and a strong planner could hide a lot of inefficiency simply by finding another truck.

That cushion has since thinned. Carriers kept leaving the market while enforcement reduced the driver pool, and by June, contract truckload rates excluding fuel were 13% higher than a year earlier.

Meanwhile, your payroll didn’t get any lighter.

You’re now paying more to move the freight while still carrying the team built for the easier market. Even rail and intermodal deserve a harder look on some lanes, which creates another problem: most mid-market teams don’t keep that expertise sitting on the bench.

How Do Freight Management Solutions Turn Freight Into a Variable Cost?

Freight management solutions change what you have to own. Instead of keeping enough planners, technology, carrier relationships, and support overhead on the books for whatever next month throws at you, you buy the capacity as freight moves. 

As volume climbs, your spend follows it. When volume falls, you’re not left paying for an operation sized for the high-water mark.

That’s the appeal for a CFO. Cost management is now the top internal concern for more than half of North American CFOs, and finance teams are being pushed toward cost structures that can flex with demand.

Freight can work the same way. Instead of hiring every time volume outruns the team, shipments can grow without the department growing right behind them.

Does Making Freight Variable Actually Make It Cheaper?

Sometimes. But making freight variable and making freight cheap are two different jobs.

You can outsource every load tomorrow and get a clean per-shipment price. That still doesn’t tell you what freight really costs. Accessorials, detention, expedites, and service failures have a habit of showing up after the rate sheet looks great.

The same goes for capacity. A low per-load price isn’t especially useful when tenders start getting rejected, especially in a market where volatility has become part of the operating environment.

The better test is whether your provider has an incentive to lower your total cost. If they make more when you ship more expensively, don’t expect them to volunteer that three lanes should consolidate.

Variable works best when lower cost and lower risk are pulling in the same direction.

How Should a CFO Evaluate Freight Management Solutions?

Four questions, handed to every provider. Including us.

1. What Are We Paying to Own Today?

Put every salary, license, subscription, integration, and support cost on one page. If a provider can’t help you build that baseline, they don’t know your business well enough yet.

2. What Does Freight Really Cost Us?

Set the rate sheet aside and pull 12 months of accessorials, detention, claims, expedites, and service failures. Linehaul never tells the whole story.

3. What Happens When Volume Moves?

Run the model at 25% down and 40% up. A variable-cost model should still make sense when freight gets weird, because sooner or later it will.

4. Who Owns the Outcome?

Count the contracts, invoices, and vendors you manage today. If those don’t shrink, you haven’t really simplified anything.

Then put the answers into a framework the board can follow, using industry benchmarks and a clear outsourced-freight ROI case.

If keeping it in-house still wins after that, keep it in-house. Run the comparison honestly and let economics make the call.

How Does a Shipper-Built Provider Like KBX Change the Equation?

KBX Logistics™ learned freight from the side of the table that was paying for it.

Long before we offered our freight management solutions outside of our own operations, we were moving 8,000 loads a day and managing $2.5 billion in annual freight across more than 80 countries for Koch companies.

We had to live with every bad routing decision, every unnecessary expedite, and every dollar of overhead that stuck around after volume changed.

To this day, that history affects how we look at a network.

If three lanes belong together, we’ll say it. If rail makes more sense than truckload, we’ll model it. Georgia-Pacific™ cut shipping costs 57% by putting that kind of scrutiny across the operation.

A shipper-built provider comes at the problem differently because we’ve already been the shipper asking the same question you are: what are we paying for, and do we still need to own all of it?

If you want to put your own freight operation through that same test, start the conversation with us.

The post Freight as a Variable Cost, Not Fixed Overhead appeared first on KBX.

Five named storms, no hurricanes, and the latest start to hurricane activity of the satellite era. But don’t cheer so loudly, freight networks still found plenty of ways to fall over without the weather’s help.

Carriers that looked rock solid in January were rejecting loads by March. Spot rates jumped. A strait that most supply chain teams weren’t discussing shut down for months and pushed up the cost of resins, fertilizer, and fuel.

By summer, a lot of “resilient” networks were tested… and not many passed.

That’s the problem.

Supply chain resilience isn’t the binder, the slide, or the annual exercise where everyone agrees they have backup options. It’s whether another carrier can take the lane, whether another mode can move the freight, and whether those options are ready before the phones start lighting up.

KBX Logistics™ spends a lot of time in that uncomfortable space between “we have a plan” and “the plan works.”

This piece looks at 2026. What stronger networks had in place heading into the year, and why hoping the next disruption lands somewhere else is still an inefficient way to run a supply chain.

If the Storms Haven’t Come, What Actually Broke Freight Networks in 2026?

First, trucks simply disappeared.

FTI Consulting tracked capacity tightening faster than at any point since 2022 as carriers that had spent years hanging on finally folded. By midyear, dry van spot rates hit $3.00 a mile with fuel, even though volumes never exploded. Everyone watching demand was staring at the wrong side of the equation.

Then Washington took another bite. FMCSA’s non-domiciled CDL rule narrowed eligibility and forced states to revisit licenses already issued. Suddenly, some of the cheapest capacity didn’t look quite so cheap.

Then came Hormuz. Months of restricted traffic through the strait repriced resins, fertilizer, fuel, and chemical feedstocks far beyond the Gulf.

Three different problems. One very expensive weakness: networks built with nowhere else to go.

Where Does a Weak Network Show Up First?

Usually, in the routing guide.

One carrier passes, then another, and the load keeps sliding down the list until the names run out. At that point, whatever rate you negotiated during bid season is beside the point. You’re buying capacity at today’s price.

A lot of shippers learned that lesson this spring. J.B. Hunt’s Spencer Frazier said routing guides set during bid season started unraveling almost immediately, while ACT Research put spot rates 43% above the prior year versus 13% for contract. Enough rejected loads, and the annual transportation budget starts changing one tender at a time.

Carrier depth gives you room before you get there. Four names on a lane can vanish quickly. A broad pool of vetted truckload capacity already connected and tendering gives operations somewhere else to turn before spot becomes the default.

What Does Resilience Look Like When Truckload Isn’t Enough?

Once the whole truck market tightens, having more names to call only gets you so far.

Supply chain resilience means the freight has another way out. Shippers leaned on that option in 2026, with intermodal volume reaching 6.4 million units through the first 23 weeks as freight shifted from truck to rail when rates climbed.

Of course, rail isn’t something you discover during one bad day. You need the relationships, equipment, and know-how to make the handoff before the lane gets ugly.

KBX put the same thinking to work when Hurricane Milton threatened a 15,180-pound UPS enclosure headed for DEPCOM Power in Puerto Rico. We moved it by RoRo, kept another route ready, and delivered on time.

How Do You Build Supply Chain Resilience Before the Next Disruption Instead of After?

You build it before anyone is forwarding weather alerts, chasing rejected tenders, or asking finance how much pain is left in the budget.

CSCMP’s State of Logistics Report makes the bigger point: disruption has become part of running the network. Resilience, then, is mostly about how many useful options you’ve already paid attention to before the obvious one disappears.

• Know Who Can Really Cover the Lane: Four carriers on paper can turn into one carrier awfully fast. Count the vetted, connected carriers that are actually tendering freight, because names in a bid file won’t rescue a load during crunch time.
• Build Another Way to Move It: Long-haul freight shouldn’t have one answer forever. Rail and intermodal take relationships, equipment, and planning, which is precisely why you want them ready before truckload rates start misbehaving.
• Leave Room for the Market to Be Annoying: January pricing has a habit of looking very optimistic by June. Contracts should expect repricing, capacity changes, and the occasional market tantrum instead of treating each one like a surprise.
• Find the Problem While It’s Still Cheap: Visibility is reaction time. Sphera found companies needed 8.7 hours to notice a disruption and more than 40 to understand the financial damage. Forty hours gives a small problem plenty of room to develop ambition.

Proxima found 72% of CEOs would accept supplier cost increases above 10% to guarantee resilience. They’re paying for options. More carriers, more modes, better visibility, and fewer frantic conversations after the network has already run out of places to go.

So, What Should Your Network Be Able to Do When Plan A Fails?

At KBX, our answer is pretty simple: it should have somewhere else to go.

We learned that inside Koch, moving chemicals, fuels, and building products for operations that can’t shrug off a missed truck. Over time, that meant building real carrier depth, multiple modes, and enough visibility to change course before a problem starts running the day.

Shippers can plug into that same structure now. 

Truckload, rail and intermodal, project cargo, global forwarding, bulk, and specialized freight all sit under one operating model. We manage more than 8,000 loads a day and $2.5 billion in freight, so rerouting, rethinking a lane, or changing modes isn’t a fire drill. It’s part of the job.

If you’re not sure how much room your network really has? Bring us your lanes. Better to find out now than let the next bad week do the audit.

The post What Does Supply Chain Resilience Look Like When Your Network Can’t Handle the Next Disruption? appeared first on KBX.

My son came home the other day with a speeding ticket. Not a cheap one either – $300.

He thought the damage was the $300 speeding ticket… until I walked him through the rest of the bill. The insurance costs that go up (and stay up). The speeding record, which means the next officer will write a ticket when he might have written a warning.

The $300 fine quickly became the smallest number on the page.

Then, I realized something: freight is procured in the same way.

The rate on the load is the ticket, printed right where everyone can see it. The rest of the bill arrives later, scattered across line items that nobody traces back to the cheap truck.

Detention when that truck sits at your dock longer than planned. A missed service level on the load you tendered to the lowest bidder. The penalty your customer wrote into the contract for exactly that miss.

All of it lands on the same P&L that celebrated the rate.

I spent more than 20 years on the shipper’s side, running transportation, warehousing, and inventory, and the discipline that survived all three jobs is Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). Price the entire thing, every touch from factory to shelf, and then go to work on reducing the total cost.

The best lesson I ever received on this concept came from a lightbulb.

About 14 years ago, I was running imports for a large home improvement retailer, and LED bulbs had just hit the market at roughly 3x the price of an incandescent bulb.

They sat on the shelf, and the merchant came to us with a challenge: get the landed cost down.

The standard playbook only goes so far. You can squeeze the ocean line on rates. You can squeeze the manufacturer on unit cost. But both run out fast.

So, I had my team buy a dozen bulbs from our own store shelves and took them apart. Somewhere between 30-45% of every package was air. New product in a fancy box, but we were paying the ocean freight providers to ship exactly that. Air.

We proposed a redesign to the merchant and the manufacturer’s packaging house and we cut the wasted space roughly in half. That simple change would now fit about 20% more bulbs into the same container, and at about 48,000 bulbs per a container, that 20% quickly became real savings.

The container cost the same to move either way… but every bulb that we added now rode free.

That same math runs a truck.

A lot of the trucks on the road right now are either underweight or under-cubed, and the two problems mirror each other: heavy freight runs out of weight with cube to spare, bulky freight runs out of cube with weight to spare.

Put two shippers’ products on the same trailer so it hits weight and cube together, and the economics of that lane change. Pulling that off takes density, volume, and somebody watching the whole network.

Service belongs in the same arithmetic.

A 98% on-time guarantee costs real money; 95% costs less and eats a penalty here and there. Neither answer is automatically wrong. The deciding number is the third one, what a miss does to your standing with that customer, and that number never appears on a rate sheet.

For a mid-market shipper, standing is the whole game, because you can’t hide behind size. Run excellent on-time service and the reward tends to be more volume, because people give more business to partners who deliver. That puts service in the growth category.

Supply chain is a cost center. I run one and I won’t pretend otherwise; I’ve never met a shipper who books it as a value center.

What total-cost thinking changes is what that cost buys you. Take out the waste, price the whole bill, and the same budget starts buying room: on price, on service, on the accounts your competitors would love to take.

That’s your competitive advantage, coming from the line item that everyone else focuses on shrinking.

From the seat: The rate is the speeding ticket. Total cost is the insurance.

Next time: The build-vs.-buy moment. When adding one more freight hire stops making sense, and how the people who have made that call actually make it.

Annant Patel
Chief Commercial Officer & Asset Strategy Leader
KBX Logistics

The post Cost Per Load Is Fine. Total Cost Is Bleeding. appeared first on KBX.

On paper, the case is easy to make. Freight volume is up. Carrier relationships need attention. Service failures still need solving. Someone needs to manage it all.

So HR starts drafting a job posting… but, before the job gets posted, take a step back.

Because that transportation hire might cost more than you think.

Most freight organizations don’t struggle because they’re understaffed. They struggle because they lack leverage.

More people can help manage freight, but leverage changes the economics of freight.

Leverage creates access to carrier density, buying power, multimodal options, market intelligence, and technology capabilities that would be difficult or expensive to build internally.

That’s the real decision. Are you adding labor or adding leverage?

That’s why the build-versus-buy decision deserves more than just a salary comparison.

If you’re spending between $10 million and $75 million annually on freight, the better question is whether the next dollar should be invested in building internal capabilities or gaining access to capabilities that already exist at scale.

The easiest way to find out is surprisingly simple: build the spreadsheet.

Put hiring in one column. Put managed freight in the other. Then calculate the full three-year cost of each. Not just salary and fees, but technology, execution, risk exposure, and the value of network optimization opportunities that may never appear on an invoice.

Once the numbers are side by side, the answer becomes much harder to argue with.

First, Build the Sheet Before You Argue the Total

The 2026 CSCMP report put U.S. logistics costs at $2.4 trillion, or 7.8% of GDP, down from 8.7%. That’s encouraging until you open your own budget and wonder who got the discount. Put hiring under Build and a provider under Buy, then make both cover identical loads and service requirements over 36 months.

Your business case needs those three years to get beyond hiring and software setup to the bills you’ll keep paying. Keep startup costs separate, and don’t add a service again elsewhere if it’s already included in the provider’s fee. A spreadsheet can overcharge you before a carrier ever gets the chance.

Next, Fill In the Four Rows That Decide It

Fill the Build cells first, since nobody’s sending you a quote for those. Then put a provider’s number beside each one.

Rows 1 and 2 are the ones your CFO expects to see. Rows 3 and 4 are the reason cost per load versus total freight cost tell you two different stories about the same year.

Block 1: The People Row 

Salary is the only number HR gave you, so start there and keep going. BLS has the 2025 median for transportation and distribution managers at $107,230. Benefits added another 30% or so on top of wages this spring. Call your $110,000 base $157,000 once it’s fully loaded, then add recruiting and half a year of ramp.

Worth every penny, honestly. Good transportation managers pay for themselves.

The trouble is what happens on the carrier call. Your new hire is negotiating with the same tonnage you had before you hired anybody, and carriers price tonnage. In the Buy cell, this row turns into a management fee, and you’re renting a whole desk instead of staffing one.

Block 2: The Systems Row 

Hire the person, skip the software, and you’ve paid $157,000 for someone to chase trucks by phone.

And most transportation teams don’t buy one system. They assemble a collection of systems.

1. Planning
2. Load tracking
3. Bids and pricing
4. Benchmarking
5. Carrier vetting
6. Carrier sourcing

Individually, each solves a problem. Collectively, they create a new problem: integrations. The challenge becomes making the technology work together.

Budget for the integration work, because that’s the part that runs long and quiet. Inbound Logistics found about half of supply chain pros pointing at bad or outdated tech this year. However, in our experience, the stack falls apart long before any single tool does. Shippers keep using the same word for it when they call us: piecemeal. 

In the Buy cell, all six should sit within one single contract.

Block 3: The Execution Row, Where the Freight Bill Actually Grows

This is where a flat cost per load hides a rising freight bill, and it’s the row most spreadsheets skip.

Say a trailer checks into a DC at 6 a.m. and doesn’t roll until 3. You pay detention, the driver loses his day, and next month that carrier prices your lane a little higher because everybody remembers. Multiply by a year of empty miles, accessorials, emergency expedites, and claims.

ATRI put the cost of running a truck at $2.336 a mile last year, with deadhead at 16.5% and 1.71 hours of dwell per stop. Your invoice won’t itemize any of that. It just quietly reappears in your rates.

Block 4: The Risk Row That Repriced This Spring

Carrier selection, compliance, capacity. Three lines, and they all got more expensive this year.

Back in May, the Supreme Court decided unanimously in Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II that brokers can be sued under state law for hiring unsafe carriers. So how you vet carriers can now be something a plaintiff’s lawyer eventually reads out loud in court. Ask yourself who’s building that file at your company.

Capacity got tighter at the same time. The FMCSA’s non-domiciled CDL rule took effect March 16; English proficiency enforcement is real, drivers keep leaving, and route guides that held for three or more years are breaking. If you move chemicals or hazmat, this row costs you more than the other three combined.

Then Price the Buy Column Like You Mean It

You’ve worked the Build side. Now do the Buy side the same favor, because it’s tempting to leave that column looking cheap when a provider hands you one number instead of six.

The management fee is the first line, not the last one. Add the onboarding stretch, the lanes that run rough during cutover, and the hours somebody on your team still spends owning the relationship. Nobody outsources freight and stops thinking about freight.

Then look at what leaves the Build side. Salary and benefits, most of the software stack, the vetting file, and the call about a truck that no-showed. Now you can total both columns and see whether cost per load versus total freight cost actually point in the same direction.

For some shippers, the spreadsheet may favor hiring. For others, it may favor outsourcing. Either outcome is fine. The goal isn’t to force the answer into one column. The goal is to understand the total economics of each operating model.

But before you total the sheet, there’s one more row to fill in. And in our experience, it’s often the row that changes the answer altogether.

The Savings Line You Can’t Leave Blank

Most shippers don’t have eight steady lanes. If yours are messier than that, there’s one more row to fill in before you total anything.

Network savings are the money that turns up when somebody actually studies your freight. Maybe backhauls are hiding against loads you already run, or a lane that costs less on rail or intermodal, or a trailer type nobody has questioned in years.

That last one is what we helped solve for Georgia-Pacific®. 

Conveyor systems and production lines were moving from Wisconsin and North Carolina to a mill in Halsey, Oregon, and the transportation budget was already in trouble. KBX Logistics® went through the lanes and trailer types, put the freight on Conestogas instead of standard flatbeds, and the conveyor shipments came back 57% cheaper on a project where nobody expected much room to begin with.

The savings didn’t come from negotiating harder. They came from seeing a different solution. That’s the difference between managing freight and optimizing a network.

Subtract your number from both columns and total them. In our experience, that row decides the sheet more often than the salary line does.

Why We Run This Sheet Before We Quote a Rate

Unlike most managed transportation providers, KBX wasn’t built to sell freight services. We were built to solve our own freight problems.

That distinction matters because shippers don’t measure success by loads covered. They measure success by total transportation cost, service performance, and network efficiency.

We’re still here, moving $2.5 billion in freight a year across 8,000 loads a day, 80 countries, and 2,000 trade lanes. Chemicals, polymers, building products, project cargo. Freight that punishes you for guessing.

That history is why we believe the best freight decisions start with understanding the network, not the next load.

That’s the advantage of being shipper-built.

When you’ve managed freight from the shipper’s seat, you learn that the biggest opportunities rarely come from negotiating another rate. Rather, they come from redesigning how freight moves altogether.

That’s what the spreadsheet is really measuring.

Start the conversation

The post The Build-vs-Buy Spreadsheet: Outsourcing Managed Freight vs. Hiring appeared first on KBX.

We decline certain freight opportunities, even when we could book loads and generate immediate revenue.

If we cannot move freight profitably for both parties, accepting it only leads to strained relationships. This discipline is rooted in KBX Logistics® origins.

As I mentioned previously, we managed Koch’s freight for years before offering our services externally. This background allows us to be selective, and approach your freight differently than a broker would.

Brokers work your freight one load at a time. Find the cheapest truck on the lane, add margin, book it, move to the next one. Nothing is wrong with that. It’s a real business, and plenty of sharp people are good at it.

However, each load is only one part of a larger network. Focusing solely on individual loads can lead to inefficiencies across the network, with incremental losses that may not be visible on a single invoice.

With 20+ years of experience managing freight costs, I have seen firsthand how these expenses impact profitability. At Koch, every business operates on real margins, so I understand margin pressure firsthand.

We plan with the entire network in mind, focusing on eliminating empty miles. An empty mile represents a cost with no return, which typically affects the customer.

We seek opportunities where our scale secures better pricing and where your loads align with ours to eliminate waste. When there is a strong fit, both parties benefit. Otherwise, we decline the freight.

Our size does real work here. We move across every mode, with truck the biggest, and the volume behind us buys capacity cheaper than a single shipper could on their own. When we find you a lower cost, it’s because we bought it lower, down at the source.

We utilize every suitable mode and arrangement, including dedicated fleets, contract lanes, and the spot market. Our goal is to match your freight with the most cost-effective and reliable solution, even if it is not immediately apparent.

Take an import shipment. The instinct is often to put it on a truck at the port and move it inland. But sometimes a cheaper, equally reliable option involves two or three legs of transportation you might never have considered.

We look for those opportunities because managing Koch’s freight required us to.

The objective is to keep the truck full and moving. Every idle hour is a lost opportunity for both the driver and the company. By maximizing utilization, the driver remains productive, the cost per load decreases, and you benefit from lower invoices.

This approach also affects our compensation model.

Brokers frequently profit from the difference between their costs and what they charge you, which is often not transparent and can misalign interests.

Everyone who moves your freight makes a margin, us included. What matters is where that margin comes from.

A broker earns it one load at a time, marking up each lane on its own, oftentimes with less focus on your network costs you per year. We earn ours differently. Our price can land at or below what the market would charge you, because we take the waste out of your network first. The margin lives in the efficiency, which keeps us pointed in the same direction as you. Lower your total cost, earn our keep by running your network well, and grow as your volume grows. 

Within Koch, we apply the same scrutiny and provide honest feedback, declining freight that does not fit. If we operate this way for our parent company, you can expect the same standard for your business.

KBX’s operational background is significant. Our incentives are aligned with yours. Organizations designed to profit from individual loads will eventually do so. We were established to manage a network for a customer that could not afford inefficiency, and we apply that same discipline to your business.

From the seat: It is our perspective and lived experience that the cheapest invoice and the cheapest network are rarely the same thing.

Next time: What that perspective actually saves you, because the price per load looks good on paper… until you add the whole year together.

Annant Patel
Chief Commercial Officer & Asset Strategy Leader
KBX Logistics

The post Most 3PLs Were Built by Brokers to Make a Margin on Your Freight. We Weren’t. appeared first on KBX.

KBX Logistics™ started as a cost center inside Koch, Inc. For years, our only job was moving Koch’s own freight, and our only customers were part of Koch.

This is an uncommon origin for a logistics company, and it is why I have confidence in KBX.

I lead the commercial operations at KBX, bringing over 20 years of experience in buying and moving freight. I began by establishing e-fulfillment networks for a major home improvement company, followed by my tenure at Georgia-Pacific™.

At Georgia-Pacific, I was tasked with building a direct-to-consumer business from the ground up. Shortly after launching, I realized the model placed us in direct competition with our own customers, the retailers we aimed to support.

We restructured the approach, providing direct-to-consumer fulfillment on behalf of our customers instead. The capability remained the same, but was now aligned with the appropriate objective.

Koch has a name for that kind of reversal — experimental discovery. You find the right answer by living with the problem until it tells you the truth.

That mindset runs on a few principles, and one of them is comparative advantage: put people and capital where they create the most value. After my time with Georgia-Pacific, I spent four years on the investing side at Koch Disruptive Technologies, working with founders who had real capabilities and needed to turn them into real businesses. That turned out to be the work I love most: Building businesses.

So when Koch asked me to take KBX to the outside market, it was a natural fit.

Initially, we considered selling software, as we had developed our own proprietary transportation management system, and software is in high demand. However, after analyzing the data and the market, we recognized our true strength lies in moving freight at scale. Therefore, we are focused on managed transportation, effectively serving as your transportation department.

Koch companies manufacture products that are inherently challenging to transport—glass, nylon, chemicals, and building materials. These goods move in every size and configuration imaginable, traveling from plants to warehouses, between warehouses, and ultimately to store shelves.

It has been said that Koch products are in 80% of the U.S. economy, given the range of industries under its roof, and we move more than 90% of Koch’s freight. One of our largest accounts alone runs from raw material to finished goods to the end customer, every mode, every kind of load.

With only one customer, accountability is immediate. Freight must move regardless of circumstances, and every Koch business operates on real margins. Mistakes directly impact financial results, so operational excellence is essential.

Years of that built something you can’t fake. We move freight across every mode, with truckload the largest by far. We hold direct carrier relationships earned over years of volume, right down to the railroads and ocean lines that others reach only through a middleman, and that volume buys capacity at prices a smaller operation can’t reach. And we learned to move freight as a network, choosing the mode and route that truly fit, which at Koch’s scale is rarely the obvious one.

We ran it that way for years, on Koch’s hardest freight, for a customer that couldn’t afford a mistake, before we ever offered it outside.

When evaluating a freight partner, look beyond branding and presentations. Ask if they have managed the outcomes of their own recommendations. Those with real experience will focus on your network, not their own margins.

We’re early with the outside market, and I’d rather say that plainly than dress it up. What sits under it is years of real freight. We became experts the only way that sticks, by running real loads through real problems.

From the seat: The freight that forged us, was freight we couldn’t afford to get wrong. 

Next time: Most 3PLs were built by brokers to make a margin on your freight, and we weren’t. There’s real math behind that, and I’ll show you mine.

Annant Patel
Chief Commercial Officer & Asset Strategy Leader
KBX Logistics

The post Why We Built Our 3PL Inside a $125B Company Before We Sold It to Anyone appeared first on KBX.

Make them prove it.

A vendor can sell you a TMS, vet carriers, benchmark rates, provide visibility, and hit every SLA in the contract.

A logistics provider looking to actually “partner” with you has to do something harder: take responsibility for whether the entire freight program gets better.

That distinction came up in a recent conversation that the KBX Logistics® team had with a SVP of Supply Chain. He had capable providers across his entire operation, but each provider owned only a piece of the operation. The SVP still owned all the seams between them, along with the extra cost and complexity that those seams had created.

For a VP or Director of Procurement, that’s what the evaluation needs to uncover before the contract gets signed. Who owns the outcome? How are they paid? What happens when something falls outside of their scope?

These 6 questions will help you separate a real logistics provider from just another vendor claiming to be your “partner.”

Question 1: How Does This 3PL Make Money?

Typically it is one of three ways – and only one should worry you.

Some take a margin on every load they resell. Others charge a flat management fee or run cost-plus, buy side in plain view. A few sign a gainshare and get a cut of savings they can prove.

The resell margin is the one to poke at, since it grows whenever your freight gets more expensive.

Ask the money question out loud to them: “If our total spend drops 12% next year, what happens to your revenue?” Count the seconds it takes them to respond. Anyone who built a business on your spend shrinking doesn’t need any time to answer that question.

Georgia-Pacific LLC® watched this play out on an Oregon mill project, where equipment makers had buried freight in their quotes and hired carriers with zero reason to shrink the number. Everything looked fine until we read the lanes.

Question 2: Is the Lowest Freight Bid Really the Cheapest?

The answer? Almost never.

Your own scoring matrix is the accomplice here: it grades linehaul, so linehaul is the number every bid was built to win. The rest of the invoice shows up later, ungraded and unbothered. Detention, layover, redelivery, reconsignment, the truck you ordered and released, the expedite that bailed out a failed tender. It adds up fast.

Carriers will bill every penny of it this year, and honestly, look at their books before you blame them. The American Transportation Research Institute (ATRI) clocked average operating costs at a record $2.336 a mile in 2025, with truckload margins under 1%. A fleet living on a penny a mile collects everything the contract allows, and drivers are already sitting 1.71 hours a stop on somebody’s dock.

The solution? 

Quit scoring the rate sheet. Hand every finalist your last 12 months of actual bills and make them price the whole ugly page the way it’ll read in next year’s budget review.

Question 3: Will Their Capacity Hold When the Market Tightens?

Not unless you check. 

2026 ran the experiment for everyone: it was not uncommon for contracted rates signed in early bid season stopped holding by May, and routing guides came apart so fast that some shippers rebid their whole book mid-year. Mini-bids turned into the year’s growth industry.

Blame the driver pool. The non-domiciled CDL rule landed in March, English proficiency violations now park drivers at roadside, and the driver pool capacity that walked away isn’t coming back for another nickel a mile.

Treat the award as a promise, but check the receipts: primary tender acceptance by lane over the trailing 12 months, how deep the guide runs before a load hits the spot market, who picks up at 3 p.m. on a July Friday, and their worst lane last quarter.

Then ask which of your truckload lanes could shift to rail or intermodal, because a second mode gives them somewhere to go when trucks get scarce, and a provider without one has your phone number.

Question 4: How Do They Vet the Carriers Hauling Your Freight?

A carrier that checked out clean in January can be somebody else entirely by August. Verisk’s CargoNet logged 677 theft incidents in Q2 with losses more than doubling to $304.6 million, with most of incidents originating from hacked email accounts and loads quietly redirected after tender. Last year’s insurance certificate catches exactly none of that.

What you should do is ask for the qualification standard itself, the actual document: safety rating floors, insurance minimums with recheck dates, double-broker controls, ID verification at the dock.

A finalist who needs a week to dig it up doesn’t have one. 

Question 5: Can They Find Savings in Your Network Before You Sign?

A real provider can.

Making all three finalists try is the cheapest tiebreaker in freight: send each the same origin-destination file and ask for one backhaul or consolidation idea at the final meeting, with a dollar figure attached.

The exercise earns its keep because by ‘finals time’ every 3PL freight management deck looks identical, and the paper has had practice. 

Armstrong & Associates counts 94% of Fortune 500 companies using at least one 3PL, up from 46% in 2001, and says the next wave of growth is aimed straight at the mid-market. Your lanes are the growth plan.

Nothing warms a skeptical room like identifying a backhaul lane that nobody knew was there. A provider that moves freight at network scale does this homework daily without being asked, and one lane pair is enough to show it.

Question 6: What Belongs in a 3PL Contract Besides Rates?

Whoever wins the homework, the contract decides what survives, because the deal outlives the pitch. The 2026 Annual 3PL Study showed 88% of shippers happy, with approximately half of the providers consolidating; thus the providers who are not consolidating are likely carrying more freight (possibly much more). 

Rates are the easy part. The rest?

• KPIs Writing: On-time can mean four different things depending on who’s counting. Define the formula.
• Raw Data Access: Your freight data in your hands, not dashboard screenshots.
• Earn-Back Service Credits: Penalties with a recovery path, so nobody plays defense all year.
• A Named Team: Real names, with an escalation path that skips the inbox.
• Step-In Rights: If performance craters, pull a lane back.

Twenty years of Vested research and Deloitte’s surveys agree: terms like these outlast rate wins.

How Does KBX Answer the 12% Question?

We answer it confidently, because ours got settled decades before anybody thought to ask it.

KBX has run Koch’s freight long before a single outside customer; and as a shipper, nobody earns a bonus for growing the freight bill. Those habits have stuck. When we spot a backhaul lane that shrinks your spend, flagging it may cost us margin, but we flag it anyway, because we’re looking at the total cost of your network and not just that lane.

We move around $2.5 billion in freight each year, 8,000 domestic loads per day across 2,000 trade lanes, everything from dry vans to project cargo.

At Georgia-Pacific, that looked like a trailer and lane review, a move off flatbeds to Conestogas after tarps kept tearing, and conveyor shipping costs down 57%. Their words, not ours: “I didn’t think there would be much opportunity here … but clearly, there is.”

So we ask, put us on the clock with everybody else. Send us the same origin-destination file you send the rest of your candidates, and we’ll show up with lane pairs and numbers.

Talk to our team.

The post How to Evaluate a Real Logistics Partner (Not Just Another Vendor) appeared first on KBX.