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.

An LTL invoice can be influenced by far more than the negotiated rate. Commodity classification, shipment characteristics, origin-and-destination pairs, carrier rules, accessorial fees, and contract language can all affect the final cost. Over time, these variables can create unnecessary expense and administrative complexity, even when a shipper believes it has competitive pricing.

That was the challenge facing one customer when it first engaged with KBX Logistics™.

The shipper was not simply looking for another carrier quote. It needed a clearer understanding of how its LTL network was structured, where costs were being created, and what changes could improve performance over the long term.

KBX approached the opportunity from a shipper’s perspective: start with the data, engage the customer to understand the network along with their current challenges, and address the underlying cost drivers before going to market.

The Challenge: LTL Costs Are Often Hidden in the Details

It is easy to evaluate an LTL program primarily through base rates or discount percentages. But a competitive-looking rate does not always translate into the lowest total transportation cost.

Two carriers may offer similar pricing while producing very different outcomes once discount and minimum charges, accessorials, freight classifications, lane coverage, service requirements, and contract provisions are applied. Small inconsistencies across these areas can compound across hundreds or thousands of shipments.

When KBX began working with the shipper, the team received the company’s full network transportation file, including its detailed LTL shipment data. KBX then conducted a thorough review of origin-and-destination pairs, freight classes, product information, service expectations and shipment descriptions.

The analysis identified opportunities related to pricing, network structure, and carrier alignment that were invisible to the shipper at the time.

Rather than treating the transportation bid as the beginning of the process, KBX treated it as an outcome of the data analysis.

That distinction matters.

A bid can tell a shipper what carriers are willing to charge. A network analysis helps determine what the shipper should be buying, from which carriers, and under what terms.

Step One: Build a Clear Picture of the LTL Network

The first objective was to establish a reliable view of how freight was moving across the network.

KBX evaluated shipment data to understand:

• The lanes and O/D combinations being used
• The freight classifications applied to shipments
• Product and commodity descriptions
• Existing carrier coverage
• Pricing structures
• Accessorial exposure
• Transit times & service commitments
• Opportunities to simplify the overall program

This review helped move the conversation beyond individual invoices or isolated lanes. It created a network-level view of where costs and complexity were accumulating.

For shippers, this is an important first step.

Without accurate and complete shipment data, it is difficult to determine whether rising LTL costs are being caused by carrier pricing, freight characteristics, network design, inconsistent processes, or a combination of factors.

Step Two: Identify the Cost Drivers Behind the Rate

Once the network was visible, KBX examined where the shipper’s pricing and operating structure could be improved.

The analysis revealed opportunities involving the company’s pricing, network setup, and carrier base. KBX then used those findings to develop a more informed sourcing strategy.

This approach reflects a broader principle of effective freight cost management: the lowest quoted rate is not necessarily the lowest-cost solution.

For example, a carrier may present an attractive discount but have a higher minimum charge on the lanes a shipper uses most frequently. Another carrier may look more expensive on paper but offer stronger lane density, fewer added charges, reliable service or more favorable operating terms.

A stronger LTL strategy considers the complete cost structure, including:

• Base transportation pricing
• Minimum charges
• Accessorial rules and fees
• Freight classifications
• Lane and service alignment
• Carrier fit
• Contract consistency
• Administrative effort

By evaluating these elements together, shippers can make sourcing decisions based on total network value rather than a single pricing metric.

Step Three: Take a Better-Structured Program to Market

With a clearer understanding of the network, KBX took the shipper’s LTL business to market.

The objective was to create a more competitive and sustainable program based on the shipper’s actual lanes, freight profile, and operating requirements.

Through the bid and negotiation process, KBX helped the shipper improve several important components of its LTL program, including rates, pricing structures, service and accessorial terms.

Because the sourcing event was supported by detailed network analysis, carrier proposals could be evaluated in context. KBX could assess how each option would perform across the broader transportation network, not just how it appeared within a rate table.

The result?

More alignment between the shipper’s freight, its carrier base, and the commercial terms.

Step Four: Simplify Contracts and Standardize the Approach

Cost reduction was only part of the opportunity.

Over time, LTL programs can become difficult to manage as carrier agreements, pricing rules, exceptions, and operating practices accumulate. This creates work for transportation, finance, procurement, and customer service teams. It can also make freight costs more difficult to predict and explain.

KBX helped the shipper simplify its carrier contracts and establish a more standardized approach to LTL management. These changes reduced administrative complexity while supporting significant cost and time savings.

Standardization can improve an LTL program by making it easier to:

• Compare carrier options consistently
• Understand how charges are calculated
• Identify pricing or invoice exceptions
• Apply repeatable shipping processes
• Manage carrier relationships
• Evaluate network performance over time

The value was not limited to a one-time procurement event. A simpler, more consistent operating model gives a shipper a stronger foundation for continuous improvement.

The Outcome: Lower Costs and a More Efficient Network

The engagement produced meaningful savings for the shipper, but the larger benefit was the creation of a more efficient and manageable LTL program.

By combining network analysis, carrier sourcing, commercial negotiation, and contract standardization, KBX helped the shipper address both visible transportation costs and the structural issues behind them.

The shipper gained:

• More competitive LTL pricing
• Fewer unnecessary accessorial costs
• Better alignment between carriers and the network
• Simpler and more consistent contracts
• Reduced administrative effort
• A stronger basis for future network decisions

The outcome demonstrates what is possible when LTL is managed as a complete network rather than a collection of individual shipments.

Why the KBX Approach Is Different

KBX brings a shipper-first mindset to freight management. Our role is not simply to move freight or conduct a bid. We work alongside customers to understand their goals, lanes, constraints, and cost drivers, then build strategies designed to improve the network over time.

That approach combines data-driven optimization, collaborative consulting, technology-enabled execution, risk management, and scalable support.

KBX’s freight management capabilities include multimodal transportation, network design, capacity optimization, load planning, scheduling, routing, and domestic and cross-border execution.

For LTL shippers, that means looking beyond the headline discount and asking more valuable questions:

• Is our carrier base aligned to the freight we actually move?
• Is pricing competitive on our highest-volume lanes?
• Which accessorials are creating the greatest cost exposure?
• Are our freight classifications and descriptions consistent?
• Do our contracts support a standardized operating model?
• Can our team clearly explain why our total LTL cost is changing?

The answers can reveal opportunities that a traditional rate comparison may miss.

Build an LTL Network That Performs Better

A well-managed LTL program should do more than produce competitive rates. It should give the shipper greater control, clearer cost visibility, simpler execution, meet service expectations and the flexibility to adapt as the business changes.

That requires a willingness to examine the details, challenge the existing network, and a desire to connect procurement decisions to operational performance; along with a resource that has the expertise, tools, and bandwidth to do so.

KBX helps shippers turn LTL data into better decisions, stronger carrier strategies, and more efficient transportation networks.

Ready to take a closer look at your LTL network?

Talk to the KBX team to identify opportunities to control costs, simplify execution, and improve performance.

The post How Smarter LTL Strategies Can Reduce Costs and Simplify Your Freight Network appeared first on KBX.

The annual Top 100 3PL list highlights logistics providers that help businesses navigate transportation challenges, improve efficiency, and create measurable value across their supply chains. For KBX, this recognition validates a commitment that has guided our organization from the beginning: putting shippers first and delivering smarter logistics solutions that drive results.

What Is the Inbound Logistics Top 100 3PL Award?

Every year, Inbound Logistics evaluates hundreds of logistics providers serving industries across North America and around the world.

The publication’s Top 100 3PL recognition highlights organizations that demonstrate excellence in transportation management, logistics technology, operational execution, and customer service.

Being selected reflects a provider’s ability to solve real-world supply chain challenges while helping customers improve service performance, reduce costs, and increase resilience.

Why KBX Logistics Was Recognized

KBX Logistics was founded with a unique perspective: supporting the logistics needs of one of the world’s largest private companies before bringing those same capabilities to external customers. That experience continues to shape how KBX approaches transportation and supply chain management today.

The recognition reflects several core strengths that define the KBX approach:

A Shipper-First Mindset

Unlike many 3PLs focused solely on making margin from transactions, KBX approaches logistics through the lens of the shipper. Every solution is designed to help customers reduce complexity, manage risk, and create long-term value across their transportation networks.

Multimodal Expertise

From truckload and intermodal transportation to project cargo, global forwarding, and managed freight solutions, KBX helps customers optimize transportation decisions across multiple modes and changing market conditions.

Technology That Improves Decision-Making

Through proprietary transportation management technology, real-time shipment visibility, carrier integrations, and actionable reporting, KBX enables customers to make faster and more informed supply chain decisions.

Operational Excellence

Reliable execution remains at the center of every shipment. KBX combines technology, transportation expertise, and disciplined processes to deliver consistent service outcomes while continuously identifying opportunities for improvement.

What This Recognition Means for Customers

Awards can be meaningful, but the greatest measure of success remains the value delivered to our customers every day.

For KBX customers, this recognition reinforces the confidence that they have partnered with an organization committed to:

• Reducing your overall transportation costs
• Improving your network efficiency
• Increasing your supply chain visibility
• Managing your transportation risk
• Scaling alongside your evolving business needs
• Delivering exceptional customer service to your team

In today’s supply chain environment, shippers need strategic partners capable of helping them navigate uncertainty and uncover opportunities for improvement across their entire network.

A Recognition Shared Across the Organization

This achievement reflects the work of KBX employees across transportation operations, customer service, technology, carrier management, engineering, and leadership teams.

As Richard Swan, President of KBX Logistics, explains:

“Being recognized as a Top 100 3PL by Inbound Logistics is an incredible honor and a testament to the trust our customers place in KBX every day. This achievement reflects our commitment to putting shippers first and creating meaningful value across the supply chain.

Most importantly, this recognition belongs to our team. Their dedication, expertise, and relentless pursuit of excellence are what make KBX stand out in the marketplace, and I am deeply grateful for their contributions.

Together, we will continue raising the bar for our partners as we grow as a trusted leader in freight management.”

Looking Ahead

While we’re honored to be named a Top 100 3PL by Inbound Logistics, this recognition is not a finish line. It is a reflection of the trust our customers place in us and the standards we set for ourselves every day.

KBX remains committed to helping shippers master complexity, improve performance, and unlock new opportunities for growth through smarter logistics solutions.

For organizations seeking a logistics partner that combines shipper-backed expertise, advanced technology, and a relentless focus on customer success, KBX is ready to help.

Contact us today to start the conversation.

The post Why KBX Was Named a Top 100 3PL by Inbound Logistics appeared first on KBX.

Bid season went fine. You beat the budget, your incumbents sharpened their pencils, and the one carrier that came in strangely cheap walked away with a nice award.

Everybody shook hands in February.

Come August, though, the freight line is over budget… again.

Ask around, and you’ll get confused looks because the contract rates never moved and nobody can point to the leak.

At KBX Logistics™, decades of moving our own freight has taught us exactly how this can happen. Coverage starts slipping on lanes the carrier priced too aggressively, trucks arrive at worse times, docks back up, and recovery costs begin appearing in budgets that have nothing to do with transportation.

The difference between cost per load & total freight cost stops being a concept the minute your freight is in it.

Cost Per Load vs. Total Freight Cost

Transportation professionals use these terms loosely, so let’s define them. Cost per load is the bid-sheet number, linehaul and fuel for one shipment. Total freight cost is everything that the network actually spent across 12 months: the spot covers, accessorials, claims, expedites, and the planner overtime nobody logs.

Your team audits the first number to the penny. The second one mostly gets discovered at the end of the year.

2026 has pulled those two numbers about as far apart as we’ve seen them. National freight spend ran 28.1% higher in Q2 than a year ago on 2.8% fewer shipments, and ATA’s chief economist chalked it up to capacity draining out of the market.

A contract rate that was too thin going in has a name on the carrier side of the table: paper. Paper rates get signed and celebrated, and then the carrier stops answering the tender.

The Spot Board Collects First

Dallas to Atlanta, dry van, 790 miles, 20 loads a week, awarded at $2.14 against a second bid of $2.29. The savings pencil out to $118 a load, roughly $123,000 a year, and if that were the end of the story, this article wouldn’t exist.

The sad reality is that it never is the end of the story.

Around June, the primary starts handing tenders back, which tracks the market: FreightWaves has national rejections at 14.36% against a six-month average of 10.9%, and refusals concentrate on lanes priced below what they cost to run. Kick back 14% of 1,040 loads, and you’re buying about 146 covers off the spot board at $3.50 a mile, call it $1,075 extra per load, $157,000 for the year.

Tally so far: $123,000 saved, $157,000 spent chasing it. And the cheap trucks are thinner on the ground since FMCSA’s non-domiciled CDL rule landed in March. Frankly, that’s part of the reason why networks with a rail leg in the mix have had a calmer summer than all-truckload ones.

Four Hours at Door 12

Detention comes next, and it barely shows up on paper. ATRI clocked drivers waiting at 39.3% of stops nationally, and for spot-market carriers, the ones now hauling your rejected freight, it’s 42.5%. A driver checks in at 6 a.m., gets Door 12 at 10, rolls at 2, and the stop was quoted at two hours. Multiply that across 146 spot loads.

Whether an invoice ever shows up is almost irrelevant, since fewer than half of detention bills get paid. Carriers settle up operationally. Your loads slide down the dispatch queue, your facility picks up a rating on the driver apps, and by spring every bid you receive has your dock time baked into the price.

A dwell alert catches this in week two. Bid season catches it in year two.

Sales Eats the Chargeback

The last stretch of cost leaves the freight budget entirely, which is why it survives every audit.

A blown appointment becomes an expedite on transportation’s ledger, then a retail compliance chargeback that comes out of sales margin (CPG and food shippers know this tax by heart), then a bump in safety stock because planning quit trusting the transit time.

Not one of those line items mentions the word freight.

That’s the machinery keeping lowest-bid alive. The person who made the award can show receipts for the savings while the damage scatters across four departments, and no monthly report ever reunites them. Your peers already feel it, with KPMG putting 77% of procurement executives on record calling supply disruption their top external risk.

The practical fix starts with a cost model that follows the freight past the invoice.

What the RFP Should Have Asked

All of this scatter traces back to one afternoon in February, when the bids got scored, and nobody asked any questions that would have caught it.

Five questions you need to ask during the RFP process:

• Tendered Acceptance by Lane, Not by Network: Ask for 12 months of accepted-versus-tendered on your actual origin-destination pairs, broken out by month. A network average of 95% can hide a Southeast lane running 70% every July, and the July number is the one you’re buying.
• A Straight Answer on the Gap: When a bid comes in 8% or more under second place, make the carrier walk you through how they got there. The answer you want involves backhaul density or a dedicated fleet already sitting in that market; anything more vague means they misread your freight and you’ll pay the tuition by Q3.
• Detention Terms You Can Enforce: Get free time, hourly rate, and any cap in writing, then ask who covers detention when a spot carrier takes the load instead of your contracted one. Most shippers discover the answer to that second part in August, on an invoice.
• The Vetting File, in Writing: Ask how a carrier gets onboarded, what gets verified at signup, and how often anyone looks again after year one. The Supreme Court held unanimously in May that negligent-hiring claims against brokers can proceed under state law, which will make these processes all the more critical.
• Fraud and Identity Controls: CargoNet logged $304.6 million in cargo theft losses in Q2, double a year earlier and averaging $564,009 an incident, with compromised email as the entry point more often than anything physical. So ask what happens between the tender and the truck arriving. A double-brokered load reaches you looking like the best quote of the week.

KBX Was the Customer First

One reason we see this pattern clearly? We lived on the shipper side of it.

KBX was built to run Georgia-Pacific’s own freight, and for decades the people grading our work were plant managers and the supply chain leaders down the hall. When the network slipped, we knew about it by lunch.

The model scaled. KBX now manages north of $2.5 billion in freight per year, and the operating habits transferred to outside networks intact.

Georgia-Pacific cut freight spend 57% with us. When Hurricane Milton shut down half of Florida, we helped DEPCOM Power’s cargo keep moving. Our freight management services are priced against the whole network, so the spot exposure, the detention, the chargebacks, all of it, sits inside our math instead of hiding outside of yours.

Before your next bid event, send us your data. We’ll run a total freight cost analysis on it and show you where value could be hiding in your network. And, if somehow the cheapest bid survives our number crunching, we’ll be the first to tell you.

Talk to a KBX freight expert.

The post The Hidden Costs of Cheap Freight appeared first on KBX.

That’s a different job than brokering. There was no contract to win and none to lose. There was just our own freight, every day, and a parent company that saw the wins and the losses.

When a broker botches a load, a customer gets upset. When we botched one, we paid for it ourselves: the expedite, the line-down claim, the Monday meeting where somebody read the freight variance out loud. We owned the wins, and we owned the losses.

What began as Georgia-Pacific’s transportation function became KBX Logistics in 2015, a dedicated Koch Inc. company built to serve an expanding freight portfolio. The network grew the whole way. Today we move 8,000+ domestic loads a day across 2,000+ trade lanes, and we’ve spent years handling freight for Koch’s customers and suppliers too.

Today, we put our lessons learned up for hire, as your dedicated 3PL partner.

Here are the top five lessons that matter most if you own freight outcomes at a mid-market shipper.

Lesson One: Improvisation Doesn’t Scale

At 30 loads a day, one sharp transportation manager can run the whole show from memory and a phone. They know which carrier flakes, which consignee detains, which lane poses unique risks during produce season. 

It works. We won’t pretend it doesn’t.

The process broke down long before we hit 8,000 loads. At that volume, a 1% exception rate means 80 problems before midday, and no phone tree can handle that level of disruption. We responded by mapping every detail, defining exceptions before they happened, and assigning accountability for every lane.

The written version proved durable, because the alternative would have been chaos with a Georgia-Pacific logo on it.

Most freight management programs never get forced through that conversion. But the market is forcing it now: the 2026 State of Logistics Report tallies $2.4 trillion in U.S. logistics costs, 7.8% of GDP, and its authors titled it “Forged in Disruption” for a reason.

Lesson Two: A Tracking Map Only Reports the Problem

Written rules need something to trip them. Visibility is where that starts, and where most programs stop. The maps work fine. Watching a trailer sit at a dock since 6 a.m. isn’t the same as anyone working the problem.

We built our side backward from that shortcoming. Carrier integrations feed KBX Track™, the plan lives in KBX TM™, and an EDI or API connection drops the exception into the ERP your team already uses.

We aren’t the motor carrier. The carrier runs the truck and the driver and owns the safety decisions that come with them. Our people own the freight side: the exception gets assigned to a KBX planner, raised with the carrier, re-planned in the system, and reported to you before you ask.

Ask a provider where its exception line sits and who on its team picks the load up after it crosses.

Lesson Three: Your Routing Guide Has a Memory Problem

None of that matters if no truck says yes. A routing guide should settle that, but it remembers bid-time prices, not who honors them in a squeeze.

The failure runs in order. The primary rejects a tender it accepted all spring. Backup plan two, priced off the March bid, declines without comment. Backup plan three takes it Tuesday, bounces it Thursday at 4:50, and Friday it’s on the spot board.

The same issue is running nationwide. Tender rejections held above 17% into July, the worst since 2022, and FreightWaves has sources calling this round “crumbling” and “different.” Not to mention, the FMCSA expects nearly all of roughly 200,000 non-domiciled CDL holders to wash out.

Lane memory, though, helps fix the amnesia: 2,000+ lanes of who actually hauls in week three and where a backhaul sits against truckload freight we already move. It’s how Georgia-Pacific cut freight costs 57% with us, by redesigning the network rather than grinding rates.

Lesson Four: Vet Hardest When You’re Desperate

Week three of a squeeze produces a dangerous moment. An unfamiliar carrier finally says yes to your distressed load, and everyone’s too relieved to look closely. 

Big mistake. 

Verisk CargoNet counts $359 million-plus in theft losses through June, about $341,518 per stolen load, and the fastest-growing method is carrier impersonation.

Our bar never had a relaxed setting, because Koch’s freight wouldn’t allow one. Koch makes chemicals, fuels, polymers, and building products, and the standard was calibrated on tank and heavy-lift work like the Koch Methanol equipment moves. A pallet of paper towels rides the same vetting as a tanker of methanol.

In Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II, the Supreme Court ruled 9-0 that negligent-selection claims against brokers survive federal preemption. Procurement teams now request vetting files the way they request insurance certs. 

For further context, we wrote up what the ruling means for shippers.

Lesson Five: Keep a Second Mode Warm

When truckload tightens, the reflex is to add carriers and rent a few more weeks at spring pricing. Rail is the other answer, and freight is already voting on which option wins: the US intermodal volume ran about 3% ahead of last year through late June.

The catch is that a lane converted in a panic costs more than the rate saves. Intermodal pencils past 500 miles and adds a day or two of transit, which sounds academic until the receiving DC doesn’t have an appointment for the container and a plant is counting on Thursday.

Which is why the mode has to run before you need it. GP and Koch freight kept ours hot year-round: owned rail assets, non-asset trucking, railcar and trailer compliance under asset services, and rail and intermodal lanes moving daily. Same readiness that delivered DEPCOM Power’s equipment through Hurricane Milton.

What This Means for Your 30+ Loads a Day

Now the honest part our own sales deck won’t volunteer: none of the above makes us a cheap quote. On a single load, on a loose lane, a broker rate may beat us on the line item. We know it, you know it, and any pitch pretending otherwise deserves your skepticism.

What we’re selling instead is the century of experience. Every one of those lessons cost our own operations real money to learn, because every failure hit our own ledger. The model that survived optimizes your network over the margin on any load. It’s why our account teams flag backhaul that cuts your spend and our load count in the same breath.

These lessons arrive on your freight in month one, already built, instead of being assembled from six vendor contracts. That’s what a true freight management partnership looks like in practice, and it’s the version of freight management logistics worth writing an RFP around.

Interested in learning more? Kick the tires with real lanes.

Send us a lane list, and the first conversation starts with your network’s control gaps, not our capabilities deck.

The post Freight Management & Logistics: What 8,000 Loads a Day Teaches appeared first on KBX.

By June, the freight line was over budget anyway. The awarded carriers were billing exactly what they’d agreed to, your lane review came back clean, and you were in a meeting explaining an overage on a network where you’d won every negotiation you walked into.

Focusing on rate alone misses where freight dollars are truly spent. The rate is just one item on an invoice, while the costs that erode margins often sit elsewhere: detention, demurrage, unpaid empty miles, reweighs, reconsignments, claims, expedited moves, and invoice errors that no one has the time or resources to identify and recover.

So you do the exercise. Pull every invoice on one lane, 40 loads a quarter, and read past the linehaul to the bottom of the page. What’s down there is the difference between the savings you booked and the savings you kept, and going after the savings is what freight cost management means once the bid is over.

Why Your Carriers Bid So Low

Start with what it costs them to haul your freight. ATRI’s July report put the average cost of running a truck at $2.336 a mile last year, the highest in the report’s history, with everything outside fuel up 4.2%.

Tolls, maintenance, tires, and driver benefits all moved the increased while rates stayed static for a third year running. A carrier that took your freight 6% under isn’t doing you a favor. It’s running thin, and a thin carrier gets very precise about every accessorial or additional cost its engagements and tariffs entitles it to collect.

That precision lands on your invoices months after the negotiation ended, which is why the big-picture numbers are so easy to misread.

U.S. business logistics costs came in at $2.4 trillion this year, about 7.8% of GDP and down from $2.6 trillion, per CSCMP’s State of Logistics Report. Costs fell across the economy while plenty of shippers watched their own bills climb.

The Receiver That’s Already In Your Rate

Every network has that facility. Two dock doors, a lunch break, and a driver checked in at 7:00 a.m. who doesn’t get called until after 1:00 p.m. Most detention costs can be traced back to a handful of locations just like that, yet they often end up as one of the largest invoice line items nobody can fully explain.

Two hours run free. After that, it’s $50 to $90 an hour depending on equipment. FMCSA data puts detention at about 1 in every 10 stops, with dwell time averaging 3.4 hours.

Your carriers figured that building out years ago, and quietly built it into their number. So you’re paying for those hours twice: once on an accessorial you can see, and once inside a linehaul you thought you’d negotiated down.

The fix can often be free. For example, with chemical and hazmat freight, where the paperwork and site protocols usually get squared away before the truck hits the gate, a four-hour turn becomes a two-hour one, and nobody bills you for time nobody wasted.

Miles You Paid For Before Anything Loaded

If a receiver’s habits can ride quietly inside your rate, so can plenty of things that happened before your bid ever opened. The biggest one is the miles your carrier ran empty only to reach your dock.

ATRI flagged elevated deadhead this year, with roughly 1 truck in 10 sitting unseated, and a 2.4% cut in fleet capacity, constituting the biggest since the freight recession started in 2022. Nobody sends you an invoice for an empty trailer. They just build it into the quote.

It keeps tightening too. June’s Logistics Managers’ Index put transportation capacity at 30.8, contracting for a seventh straight month, while transportation prices hit 92.4, a few points off May’s record.

Which makes this a bad year to leave a long lane on truckload just because it’s been there since before you took the job. IANA’s intermodal index has held above 106 for two straight months, which reads as shippers converting rather than a seasonal bump. The Q1 spread between truckload and intermodal spot rates was also the widest in the Journal of Commerce index’s history.

KBX Logistics™ and Georgia-Pacific™ went after routing using that logic and took out about 4 million nonrevenue miles and 615,000 gallons of diesel.

What Your Expedite Line Is Telling You

Detention and empty miles cost you about the same in a quiet quarter as in a bad one. Expedite works differently, since it only bills after something’s already gone wrong.

Imagine it’s a Thursday afternoon. A plant runs dry by Monday, and somebody books a truck at whatever the market’s asking, which for expedited freight typically means two to three times a standard rate. The load gets coded as freight alongside everything else, and the reason it happened never makes it into writing.

By the time you’re paying that premium, the money’s gone. You’re settling up on a lane that failed a week earlier.

Give expedite its own row in your reporting, and it reads as a list of the lanes that can’t absorb a bad day, plus the carriers who quit answering when the first plan falls apart. On project cargo and bulk and specialized freight, one damaged component or a compliance miss wipes out a year of rate savings in an afternoon.

The Bottom Half of the Invoice

The fuel surcharge from your audit is often the odd one out, because nothing had to go wrong for it to show up.

It came off index back in April and kept billing wrong on every load in that lane for the rest of the year. Reweighs, reclasses, and misapplied accessorials clear the same way.

That’s the only money in this piece you never owed in the first place, and it’s the hardest to spot, because each charge on its own is small enough to look like noise.

If any of your freight arrives by ocean, the same habit pays better still. Demurrage runs $150 to $300 per container per day, and under the FMC’s 2024 billing rule, an invoice landing more than 30 days after the charge, or showing up without required fields, can be disputed outright.

Four Numbers That Catch It Earlier

Reading 40 invoices by hand found the money on one lane. That isn’t scalable to 200 of them. These four metrics illustrate the same problems without the manual audit, and none of them need data you aren’t already sitting on.

1. Accessorials as a Percentage of Linehaul: Track it by facility instead of by carrier. The receiver quietly costing you three hours a load separates itself from the pack inside a quarter.
2. Deadhead Across Your Awarded Network: Empty miles get priced into your rate whether you measure them or not. The number tells you which lanes are candidates for backhaul matching, and which are just expensive by geography.
3. Claims and Expedite as a Share of Total Spend: Together they measure how often your network fails. A rising number means fragile lanes and carriers who stop answering, months before any of it reaches a rate increase.
4. On Time In Full: Service and cost are the same metric once a load runs late. Every missed appointment turns into detention, a reconsignment, or an expedite somewhere downstream.

Keep all four somewhere central and benchmark them against the contract you signed instead of your memory of last quarter.

KBX Used To Be the One Paying This Invoice

For years, the freight bills for Georgia-Pacific came to KBX Logistics. A receiver that couldn’t turn trucks before 1, a long lane sitting on truckload because nobody revisited it, a surcharge quietly off index since spring. All of it hit our own P&L, so the freight arm was built to catch those things upstream instead of finding it in an audit.

That’s still the model today. Managed freight through KBX puts a team on the whole page rather than the top line of it; so the appointment gets locked before the truck shows up; the backhaul gets matched against the lanes Koch freight already runs on; and the accessorial turns up in KBX Track™ early enough that somebody can still address it.

Georgia-Pacific saw freight cost fall 57% on a facility modernization project once this level of attention reached their freight management program. The reduction was done through trailer selection, loading practice and coordination. Nobody renegotiated a rate.

Send us one O/D pattern, and the KBX team will show you where your backhaul is. That’s the first conversation. Talk to us about the rest of the bill.

The post Freight Cost Management: The Total-Cost View Beyond the Rate appeared first on KBX.

It never gets explained that way, though. The job request went to HR in the spring with a clean justification attached, sat through the second quarter while you covered the gap yourself, and came back in June with a note about the cycle.

So you kept working the detention disputes, and the carrier who quit answering after his third rejection, and the trailer that’s been at a DC outside Memphis since Tuesday.

What you were after was carrier coverage across lanes you can’t cover alone, rate visibility that no load board sells, and somebody to own a compliance file nobody has opened since the spring. The only word finance has for any of that is headcount, so headcount is what went on the request.

The answer? Most of it can be rented instead. Freight management services are how a shipper your size gets scale without growing it one hire at a time, and the argument for renting got considerably easier to make sometime around June.

The Market Turned While the Request Sat with HR

In June, the national average dry van spot rate passed the contract rate for the first time since February 2022, with spot linehaul across van, reefer, and flatbed running at least 39% over last year, while volumes underneath stayed flat or fell.

Rates that climb while volume sits still are a story about trucks leaving. Carriers have been handing back their authorities quietly for three years; the slack finally ran out this spring, and a tender rejection that used to be a bad afternoon now shows up most of the week.

Even after the holiday pullback, rates were holding 40-50% above last year, and forecasters expect the run to last through 2026. Your route guide got priced during last year’s bid season, when capacity was cheap, and nobody was planning for a market that reprices every six weeks.

A Hire Doesn’t Come With a Route Guide

Suppose you’d won and the job req cleared in July, and suppose a good candidate signed in September, which would put you ahead of most shippers hiring this year.

What shows up in September is a résumé. Everything that made the new hire good — the carrier reps who take their call, the lane knowledge, the relationships — belonged to their last employer, at their volume, in their lanes, and rebuilding it around your network can take nearly two years (if they stay that long).

Median pay for a transportation, storage, and distribution manager was $102,010 in May 2024, which puts you near $140,000 before they ever cover a load, and that’s the number everybody argues over. The ramp never makes the business case, and the ramp is where the request quietly dies.

Your CFO happened to be right about the req, and the build-versus-buy math would have gotten them there for completely different reasons.

And Then the Freight Person Leaves

Run it out 18 months and say it all worked: two people, a written route guide, and an org chart that finally looks like something.

Turnover across supply chain and logistics operations averaged 11.6% last year in Peerless Research Group’s survey work, and only about one shop in five reported nobody leaving at all.

The BLS counts roughly 26,400 logistician openings a year through 2034 on 17% growth, plus 18,500 for transportation and distribution managers, so the market has been calling your bench a while.

When they go, the written guide stays, and everything that made it work walks out with them: the carrier rep’s cell number, the trick for getting the receiving plant to take a four o’clock appointment, the reason lane 411 always covers on Thursday, even though the rate says it shouldn’t.

Then you’re back to March, in a tighter market, with a list you probably recognize.

What Freight Management Actually Provides

Freight management services means an outside team plans, tenders, executes, and optimizes your freight across all modes using its own carrier network, technology, and people. At the same time, you keep control of the network strategy. It’s a completely different animal from a broker who covers a load and disappears until the next one.

What you’re renting is mostly density & scale:

1. Enough carriers per lane that a rejection becomes a substitution instead of a phone call to you.
2. Enough volume that somebody knows what the lane pays this week instead of at bid.
3. Enough mode flexibility to shift freight onto rail and intermodal when the math flips.

All of it scales with volume instead of headcount, and that’s the whole reason a $200M shipper can’t build it and can rent it without touching an org chart. 

CSCMP’s State of Logistics Report in June listed workforce shortages among five systemic forces reshaping the industry, and nothing on that list has a fix yet.

A Risk Nobody Can Staff For Got Bigger on May 14th

A unanimous Supreme Court held in Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II on May 14 that federal law doesn’t preempt state negligent-hiring claims against a broker who hires an unsafe carrier, though Justice Kavanaugh’s concurrence added that brokers who act reasonably in selecting quality carriers should expect to prevail in court against such claims.

“Acting Reasonably” has a working definition now, and it’s due diligence supported by effective record-keeping. Pull the safety data, verify authority and insurance; document how each carrier met the quality standards; routinely update safety and performance information on approved carriers.

The ruling deserves a 10 minute read.

What Rented Leverage Looks Like on a Normal Day

ATRI clocked the average dwell at an hour and 38 minutes per stop in 2024, roughly 22 minutes under the line where detention starts getting called excessive. The loads that run past it eat their own margin, and the shipper generally learns about it in November, on an accessorial invoice too old to fight.

An alert at 9:15 while the driver’s still in the yard is a different situation entirely, because somebody can go move them before the meter runs.

The thing people get wrong about freight management partnerships is what the transportation manager keeps vs. what is eliminated. The answer? They keep all of it: the network strategy, the plant relationships, the judgment calls, the seat at the S&OP table. What goes away are the four jobs that got stapled onto their job somewhere around 2023.

Nobody’s replacing them, and any version of the trade that does isn’t worth signing.

Leverage Is Rented From Someone Who Built It

KBX Logistics has spent over a century in freight operations, and the carrier network, the rate discipline, and the compliance muscle all got built for one unglamorous reason: Our own CPG, chemicals, polymers, and building products had to move, and there was nobody to call.

$2.5B+ in freight under management, 8,000+ domestic loads a day, 2,000+ trade lanes, all of it built as overhead on somebody’s P&L instead of a product on a shelf.

None of that came from hiring. It came from running freight for a very long time, and a mid-market shipper can rent the result instead of spending 20+ years reproducing it.

Georgia-Pacific cut freight spend 57% while working with KBX. DEPCOM powered their shipments through Hurricane Milton by partnering with KBX. Neither came out of somebody’s second coordinator; both came out of a network that existed long before the phone rang.

The first conversation is smaller than it sounds. Send an origin-destination pattern, and KBX will show you where your opportunity exists. No sales deck involved, and if the number holds up, you’ll have something to carry back to the CFO who said no.

Talk to the KBX team to make it happen.

The post You Don’t Need a Bigger Team. You Need Better Leverage. appeared first on KBX.