• The TMS promised smoother tendering.
• The visibility platform promised fewer “where’s my truck?” calls.
• The benchmarking tool promised a clearer view of what you should be paying.

And to be fair, each one does roughly what it promised.

The problem lies with what happens between these systems.

A rate gets rekeyed incorrectly. An exception alert sits in a shared inbox all morning. These problems often live in the handoffs, where ownership can get blurry and the work ultimately falls back on your team.

That’s the hidden tax of a piecemeal tech stack, and those hidden costs eventually come due.

That hidden tax matters even more as freight costs continue to rise. In September, the Cass Freight Index showed freight expenditures 20.4% higher year over year.

At KBX Logistics™, we know this challenge from the shipper’s side, because we built and ran freight management solutions for Koch companies long before offering them to outside shippers. That experience helps shape the checklist that follows: six jobs every load needs done, and one question for each that helps determine whether a provider can truly own the outcome.

We sell all six. And we think you should hold us to the same standard.

Planning & Optimization: The Job That Isn’t Demo-ed

Planning decides how a load moves before anyone quotes a rate: the mode, the equipment, what ships together, and when. It’s the least glamorous job on the list, and it’s where most of your freight spend is committed.

The challenge with standalone planning tools is that optimization is only as good as the operational context, data, and integrations behind it.

The 2027 Third-Party Logistics Study explains why that hurts: planning and routing deliver the biggest reported payoff from AI, and bad data and old integrations hold them back.

We plan the same freight our team books and runs, so our load planning comes from people who’ll hear about it when a call goes wrong. On one Koch Methanol project, that meant ruling out rail over damage risk and moving nine containers of gas-control gear 5,500 miles by road and ocean. All nine arrived intact and on time.

So before you sign with a provider, find out whether their planners ever touch a live load in their day-to-day work. 

Bids and Pricing: The Rate Has to Survive the Year

Once the plan says truck, somebody has to buy those trucks. That’s the pricing job, from the annual RFP to the accessorial terms nobody reads until the first detention bill. 

The award rate it produces is often the most optimistic number you’ll see all year, because it assumes every tender gets accepted.

In a split stack, the bid team hands off its awards. When carriers reject, whoever covers those loads never saw how the rates were set and buys their way out on the spot market. That’s how a lowest-bid award becomes a stack of spot invoices by fall. 

FTR told Logistics Management it expects contract rates, fuel aside, to hit records by year-end, so don’t expect those invoices to get smaller any time soon.

We price and plan the same freight, so whoever sets a rate lives with it. On Georgia-Pacific’s™ project in Halsey, Oregon, that cut conveyor shipment costs 57%, partly by swapping flatbeds for Conestogas. 

The question for any provider: Will the people building your bid be the ones covering the loads carriers turn down?

Benchmarking Tools: Catch the Rate Before It’s Stale

The early warning for those rejections is benchmarking.

The idea behind benchmarking is to hold each lane up against what the market pays now, so you know which lanes to rebid and which to leave alone.

Bought as a subscription, though, it tends to arrive as a quarterly deck, and a quarterly deck is a history lesson. By the time someone presents it, carriers on the lanes it flagged could already be turning loads down.

That lag also costs more than usual right now. The Logistics Managers’ Index had transportation prices at 92.7 in September, where anything over 50 means they’re rising.

The people answering the survey also expect more of the same over the next 12 months.

We write benchmarking into the same agreement as bids, sourcing, and carrier vetting, so somebody’s on the hook to act on it. Our read on the market comes from 8,000 domestic loads a day, and we grade lanes on total cost, counting rejections, spot covers, and accessorials along with linehaul. 

Carrier Management and Sourcing: Backup That Doesn’t Come Off a Load Board

A good benchmark keeps your rates honest, but price isn’t the only reason carriers walk.

They also remember who paid on time and whose docks kept their drivers waiting half a day. Sourcing is the work of being the shipper they want to haul for, with backup ready when the primary says no.

In a piecemeal tech stack, the backup is a broker working a load board the afternoon before pickup. In the conversations, rail rarely comes up, even though U.S. intermodal volume was up 10.4% from a year earlier in early October, per the AAR.

We’d rather be the 3PL that carriers call back, so we get a direct line to our team, flexible payment terms, and a fuel card that saved them an average of 53 cents a gallon in Q4 2024. 

We also run rail and intermodal across 168 railroads, so a long-haul backup can be a railcar instead of whatever’s left on the board.

So, ask who covers the load when the primary says no, and whether that truck was on anybody’s approved list.

Preapproved Carrier Network: Vetted Carriers Before You’re Desperate

In May, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled in Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II, LLC that federal law does not preempt state-law negligent-hiring claims against freight brokers. Those claims can now proceed in state court, putting even more scrutiny on how brokers select and monitor the carriers moving your freight.

Cargo theft adds another reason to look closely at those controls. While 69% of 3PLs report being extremely satisfied with their technology defenses, only 36% of shippers share that confidence.

We’d side with the shippers on this one. Don’t take “we vet our carriers” at face value. Ask for the requirements, how they’re verified and how often they’re rechecked.

Our carrier requirements are public: at least 20 asset trucks, an NMFTA-issued SCAC, and insurance certificates sent straight from the carrier’s insurance agent.

The question to ask: Can you show me exactly how a carrier gets into your network, and what could get them removed?

Load Tracking and Visibility: Seeing the Problem Is the Easy Part

A carrier can clear every one of those checks and still haul your load to the wrong address.

Verisk CargoNet warns that criminals can change a delivery address or contact after pickup, slipping past controls built around carrier selection.

Tracking is supposed to catch that, and it’s the most oversold function on this list.

KBX Track™ can put a dot on a map, and so can every other platform. The real value is what happens when that dot turns off the interstate unexpectedly. Who sees it, who decides what to do, and who acts before your customer has to call? KBX Track™ provides centralized visibility and real-time alerts, but the technology is only part of the equation.

In a piecemeal stack, it’s usually nobody until your customer calls.

Acting early is most of the job. During Hurricane Milton in October 2024, we had a 15,180-pound power supply enclosure for DEPCOM Power™ headed from Jacksonville, Florida, to Puerto Rico. We booked RoRo space, kept a reroute plan ready, and got it there on time.

That’s the difference between tracking a shipment and managing one. Visibility tells you something changed. Freight management means someone owns what happens next.

The question to ask: When a shipment goes off plan, who sees it, who makes the decision and who owns the resolution?

How KBX Runs All Six Functions Under a Single Agreement

Buy freight management solutions one function at a time, and you may end up like the homeowner with six good contractors and no general contractor. Nobody owns the handoffs, and a seventh tool to watch the other six just adds another handoff.

We own the handoffs, and all six functions run under a single agreement. We said you should run this list on us, so these are our answers:

• Planning: Our planners book and run the freight they plan.
• Pricing: Whoever sets your rates also covers the loads carriers turn down.
• Benchmarking: Lanes get graded on total cost against 8,000+ domestic loads a day.
• Sourcing: Backup comes from parties with a direct line to us, or rail across 168 railroads.
• Carrier vetting: Our subcontractors meet our published requirements before they haul for you.
• Tracking: KBX Track™ alerts go to people who can act on them.

We built our model with a shipper-first mindset, starting as Georgia-Pacific’s transportation group, and now managing more than $2.5B in freight annually for Koch companies. 

Your TMS stays the system of record, with us connected around it, and nobody has to hand over all six on day one. Molex™ started with us on two lanes and is now past 2,000.

Put the same six questions to everyone else on your shortlist, and make each of them justify their cut. We’ll tell you straight which functions belong with us and which don’t. 

Contact us to learn more.

The post Freight Management Solutions: Six Functions Under One Provider appeared first on KBX.

We’ve delivered to more than tens of thousands of unique addresses this year. With that kind of volume spread across the country, there should be a good home for most loads within the carriers we already use, all of which have cleared our vetting process.

When that fit becomes predictable enough, some carriers will even accept our tenders automatically. They know the freight. They know how it fits their network. And they already know they want it.

That network fit matters because freight changes constantly.

A plant goes down for three days of maintenance and suddenly there are trailers with nothing to do. We start looking for other freight that can keep that capacity productive.

A customer heading into peak needs to pull orders forward and land a block of volume next week. Our Managed Transportation team understands what that customer needs, and my team goes to work finding the carrier capacity to deliver it.

That sounds straightforward. It rarely is.

Sometimes a carrier will tell me, “We’re having a hard time retaining drivers on this piece of KBX business.” That conversation often leads to rate. But my first question is different:

What can we change about the freight to make it better for the driver?

Maybe the issue is dwell. Maybe it’s when the appointment is scheduled. Maybe the lane makes it difficult for a driver to get home. Whatever the answer, I want to understand it.

Because replacing drivers costs carriers money, and eventually those costs show up somewhere in the rate.

We heard a lot about that at our Strategic Carrier Summit this year. Carriers weren’t just talking about tractors, trailers and freight. They were talking about drivers.

Their drivers are asking questions like, “Why was my pay down 10% last week?” or “Why didn’t I get home in time to see my kids?”

Someone at that carrier has to answer those questions.

That’s an important reminder that network fit isn’t an abstract optimization exercise. There is a driver sitting behind the wheel at the end of every decision we make.

That becomes especially important for smaller independent operators. They don’t have thousands of trucks to absorb inefficiencies across the network. 

Empty miles matter. Fuel matters. Time matters.

If our network aligns closely enough with theirs to reduce empty miles, more of the miles that driver runs are productive miles.

That’s good for the carrier, but it’s also good for the shipper. Capacity that fits a carrier’s network is capacity they have a reason to keep showing up for.

I’ve been around that side of trucking most of my life.

My dad worked his way up through LTL sales and eventually became a partner in a for-hire OTR carrier in Southern California. He started before deregulation and still consults today. About half our conversations are about his grandkid. The other half are about trucking.

So, I’ve been hearing about freight at the dinner table since I was a kid.

And today, the driver conversation is one I pay especially close attention to. Carriers are navigating driver turnover, changing labor dynamics and new rules affecting non-domiciled CDLs, all while trying to keep their networks productive.

I spent the freight recession on the carrier side myself, trying to figure out how to stay profitable after rates went through the roof and then fell off a cliff. I came to KBX in May 2026 with the market starting to move again.

That experience changed the way I look at capacity.

An available truck isn’t necessarily the right truck. And the lowest rate isn’t necessarily the freight-carrier match that will hold up over time.

So, every day, my team goes back through the loads that got a “no” yesterday and asks a different question today: Whose network does this freight fit?

Because somewhere out there, there’s a carrier that wants that load to go exactly where it’s going.

My job is finding them.

Jared Denniston
VP of Capacity Solutions
KBX Logistics

The post Your Load Fits Somebody’s Network. My Job Is Finding Whose. appeared first on KBX.

Add AAR’s October Rail Industry Overview, which calls Q3 2026 the biggest quarter U.S. intermodal has ever had, and you can guess the email: Why isn’t more of our freight running on the rail?

The honest answer: some of it should be, and nobody’s had the time to work out which lanes make sense to convert.

Habit keeps those lanes on trucks. Guess wrong the other way, though, and you’ve traded a truck bill for a container sitting at a Chicago ramp for three days while your receiver calls every two hours.

At KBX Logistics™, rail, intermodal, truckload, freight management, and asset services operate together under one organization. That means decisions can be made based on what is best for the shipment and the network rather than what fits a particular business unit.

So we’d answer the CFO the way we’d work any lane: starting with the freight on your dock, before anybody touches the routing guide.

The Best Rail and Intermodal Lanes Are Boring

Start with your dullest freight. The lanes that belong on rail and intermodal run long, move steady volume every week, and end at a receiver with a few days of slack.

Trucks keep the hot orders, the short hauls, and the miles at either end of the rail move.

Take a resin plant outside Houston shipping to a converter near Chicago. Its bulk resin already rides covered hopper cars off a siding. The bagged resin goes by truck, but it could ride a 53-foot intermodal container with a dray at each end. Those are two different rail products, and a spreadsheet that blends them misprices both.

Houston to Chicago has the miles, but the bagged resin still has to earn the move. Eno Center research ties mode choice to transit time, cost, and what the product is worth, inside hard limits like terminal capacity and scarce rail spurs. So check weight, cutoffs, and how many days of inventory the converter really carries.

Split the Lane: Steady Freight on Rail, Hot Orders on Trucks

Most networks pick a single mode per lane and live with it. A provider running rail and trucks can split the lane instead. The weekly replenishment out of Houston rides rail, and when the converter runs short, a truck takes the hot order.

Our part is the unglamorous stuff: the right railcars for bulk and specialized freight, enough of them in the right place, and an asset services team keeping the fleet maintained and compliant. On the road, dedicated fleets give the high-volume lanes committed trucks for the weeks when the spot market gets volatile.

Fair warning, though: anybody who owns railcars has every reason to fill them, us included. So ask for proof that a provider will say no to rail.

Our proof is Koch Methanol’s gas-control equipment. The plan called for rail, but that route was a rough ride for sensitive components, so we moved all nine containers the 5,500 miles from Austria to Louisiana by road and ocean. Everything arrived on time and undamaged.

Who Owns the Handoffs When Freight Changes Modes?

Your managed freight provider should own the handoffs between modes, with a named party responsible for coordinating each transfer. If you’re still chasing the railroad, dray carrier, and broker for answers, you’re doing the job you hired that provider to handle.

When a Houston-to-Chicago container misses Tuesday’s rail cutoff, your provider should find out whether Wednesday’s train can still meet the receiver’s appointment and price a truck alternative. They bring you a recommendation with the cost and timing of both options, get any approval they need, and arrange the next move.

Keeping those connections on schedule also takes follow-up between tracking updates. KBX Track™ alerts and EDI or API connections can help flag delays, but your provider needs to know which rail milestones they report and where someone needs to make a call. Agree on those responsibilities before the first shipment, so you know who’s handling the freight even when the tracking feed is quiet.

What Moving Freight to Rail Really Costs

Rail may give your container a cheaper ride from Houston to Chicago, but it still needs a truck at each end. Add terminal fees and chassis charges to get the full transportation cost, after you check what’s already included in the quote.

The longer trip can cost you money too. 

If rail adds a day or two, the receiver may need extra stock to avoid running out before your shipment arrives. You have to pay to buy and hold that stock. A few extra pallets of resin may be manageable, while the inventory needed to keep an auto parts production line supplied could eat up the freight savings.

Have your provider compare that full bill with the cost of trucking the same shipment door to door. You need to know whether rail is still cheaper after those expenses and whether it can meet your customer’s delivery date.

Pilot a Rail Lane Before You Rewrite the Routing Guide

If rail still looks cheaper, try the Houston resin lane before you change the routing guide. You need to see whether the savings and delivery dates hold up over several loads, with enough room in the schedule to handle a delay.

Agree upfront on three things:

1. Total Cost: Track the final bill for every load, plus any extra inventory or trucking needed to keep the receiver supplied. Confirm when storage charges start so those fees don’t catch you by surprise.
2. Delivery Performance: Check each arrival against the agreed delivery window. Look at how often shipments run late and whether the customer can absorb those delays.
3. Recovery Options: Decide who can approve a backup plan and check which options remain available after the container’s on the train.

Give the lane more freight once it consistently saves money and meets delivery dates without your team having to arrange a rescue every week.

What Your CFO Really Wants to Hear

Most CFOs don’t care whether a shipment moved by truck, rail, or intermodal.

They care whether the company spent less money moving freight this year than it would have otherwise.

That’s why transportation leaders should avoid presenting rail and intermodal as transportation projects. They should present them as network optimization tools.

For example, a transportation team may identify a group of long-haul lanes where intermodal can reduce transportation costs during periods of elevated fuel prices. Six months later, changing customer requirements or tighter transit expectations may make truckload the better option on those same lanes. The value wasn’t the mode itself. The value was having the flexibility to make the change. The ability to plan, coordinate, and optimize freight across multiple modes is a core element of freight management.

When transportation modes are managed separately, those decisions often take time. Different providers, different contracts, and different operating models can slow the evaluation process. When truckload, rail, intermodal, and freight management operate together, transportation leaders can compare alternatives quickly and select the option that best fits current network conditions.

The conversation with finance becomes more powerful when the focus shifts from rates to adaptability.

Instead of saying:

“We saved $200 per load by moving freight to intermodal.”

The transportation leader can say:

“We built a network capable of shifting between truckload, rail, and intermodal based on market conditions. As fuel costs increased and truck capacity tightened, we already had alternatives available. When service requirements changed, we moved freight back to truckload where it made sense. We optimized the network instead of committing to a single mode.”

That is a strategy a CFO can support because it improves more than transportation costs.

The strongest transportation organizations don’t measure success by the percentage of freight moved on rail or intermodal. They measure success by how quickly they can adapt the network while controlling cost and maintaining service.

That’s why multimodal transportation strategies are increasingly valuable. Rail, intermodal, and truckload are not competing solutions. They’re tools that can be deployed together to balance cost, service, capacity, and risk across the network.

Optimization Happens Faster When One Team Owns the Network

The biggest advantage of a multimodal provider isn’t necessarily access to railcars or trucks.

It’s decision speed.

When transportation modes sit with different providers, evaluating alternatives often requires multiple conversations, multiple quotes, and multiple systems.

When one team manages the network, they can compare options immediately:

• What is the truckload cost?
• What is the intermodal cost?
• What transit impact should we expect?
• How tight is capacity?
• Is a rail solution available?
• Does one mode create additional risk?

That is the difference between managing individual shipments and managing a transportation network.

That’s the habit we built moving Koch’s freight, and it’s how we run 8,000+ domestic loads a day now. On a lane like Houston to Chicago, you’d get rail, intermodal, and truckload in a single managed freight program from a 3PL that grew up inside of a shipper.

Bring us a recurring lane, its shipment profile, and what the receiver needs, and we’ll tell you whether it belongs on a train. If it doesn’t, you’ll hear that too.

The post Rail, IMDL, and FTL: Why the Best Networks Don’t Pick Just One appeared first on KBX.

• What does our carrier vetting process require?
• What has changed in that process over the last month?
• What are we doing about it over the next six months?
• How do we determine a carrier is a good fit for their network?

Almost nobody calls me to ask why carrier XYZ is picking up the load today.

For our customers, carrier vetting is no longer a background process. It’s become a front-and-center priority.

I joined KBX Logistics™ in May 2026 after spending much of my career on the other side of the desk. I started with asset-based carriers across dry van, refrigerated, and flatbed, working my way from managing fleets to running a terminal. Later, I moved into carrier operations for a large furniture manufacturer, where I went from selling capacity to buying it.

I’ve spent time on both sides of the table, and that shapes how I think about the carriers we put on a shipper’s freight.

One thing I learned quickly after joining KBX: by the time a carrier shows up to move a customer’s load, the important work has already happened.

They’re already approved to do business with us. They’ve met our insurance and safety requirements. They’re connected for electronic tracking. Nobody on our team should be calling a dispatcher just to figure out where a truck is.

Carriers ask me all the time how they can earn more of our freight. My answer almost always starts with their network.

Before I sign anyone, I look at where their trucks already run against the gaps in our network. If those datasets don’t overlap, I rarely sign them. Adding another carrier to the network just to have another carrier doesn’t create much value for either party.

When there is a fit and the carrier meets our requirements, we work to set each other up for success. We give carriers access to Loadshop™, our KBX load board, where we post one-off spot opportunities. That gives new carriers an opportunity to prove themselves on our freight before they’re considered for committed lanes.

How they perform matters.

We value our incumbent carriers. If our incumbent carriers consistently deliver strong service and remain competitive, creating value, they’ve earned the opportunity to retain that business.

But networks change.

A lane that fit a carrier last year may not fit the same way this year. When that happens, a carrier that has proven itself running our spot freight through Loadshop™ can get a real opportunity to compete for committed capacity.

That means our job isn’t just to vet carriers. Our job is to make sure the right carriers can efficiently identify the freight that fits their networks and compete for it.

That message came through clearly at our 2026 Strategic Carrier Summit in Green Bay. One carrier told me that an RFP from us used to mean sorting through hundreds or thousands of lanes one by one, figuring out which fit their network, and pricing each manually against where they thought the market would land. It could take days, sometimes weeks.

Today, they can run that same analysis through software in minutes.

That matters because a better procurement process should produce better matches, not simply more bids.

I want carriers competing on freight that makes sense for their networks, because those are the relationships that are more likely to perform when the freight actually moves.

Of course, price still matters.

I buy on contract and on spot. A stock transfer, for example, might give me an opportunity to sharpen my pencil on rate. But that load still goes to a carrier that has cleared the same vetting requirements.

Price may determine who gets the load. It doesn’t determine who gets through the door.

And that brings me back to the questions I get from shippers.

When a customer calls me about carrier vetting, they rarely want to know what our standards were six months ago. They want to know what we’re doing today, what has changed, and what we’re doing next.

I owe them a clear answer every time.

And frankly, it’s the same question every shipper should be asking whoever they trust to move their freight:

What has changed in your carrier vetting process lately, and why?

Jared Denniston
VP of Capacity Solutions
KBX Logistics

The post How We Pick the Carriers That Handle Your Freight appeared first on KBX.

At KBX Logistics™, we’ve watched that happen from the shipper’s side of the table. 

We ran Koch’s freight long before we ran anyone else’s, and with the bill for every wasted trip home landing on our own desk, we learned to go find the backhaul ourselves.

To this day, that’s still how we run freight for outside shippers, and network optimization is how we do it. However, the method matters less than the motive. 

In this article, we discuss the five reasons a Koch-owned 3PL like us raises the backhaul opportunity you’d miss, starting with where we came from.

1. We Started Out Paying for Our Own Empty Miles

Before we had a single outside customer, we were Koch’s in-house freight operation. We began as Georgia-Pacific’s™ transportation function, became KBX Logistics in 2015, and grew to run freight for the rest of Koch’s companies. Every truck that came home empty on those lanes came out of our own budget.

When the empty miles are your own, you notice them. 

We learned to read every lane as a round trip and to go looking for a load to fill the trip home before anybody asked. That reflex is why we spot backhauls a bid sheet often skips right past.

We kept that reflex when we opened our operations to outside shippers, and it’s what “for shippers, by shippers” means in practice. We look at your freight the way we learned to look at our own, with the trip home counted as part of the cost.

2. Our Scale Fills Your Trip Home

Spotting an empty trip home only helps if you have something to put on the truck, and that’s where scale comes in. We move 8,000+ domestic loads a day across 2,000+ trade lanes, so there’s a good chance some of our freight starts near where yours ends.

When it does, the equation changes. Your outbound load and our truckload freight headed the other way become a round trip; the carrier gets paid in both directions, and your rate drops because the truck no longer has to price in an empty drive home.

The savings are real too. 

With ATRI putting 2025 trucking costs at a record $2.336 a mile and deadhead at 16.5%, our calculations say empty miles add roughly $277 to the average 600-mile load. 

Sure, a broker can find you a truck. But filling its trip home takes freight that’s already moving, and we have plenty.

3. We’re Paid on Efficiency

Most 3PLs earn a markup on every load they move, which makes a backhaul awkward.

It lowers your rate, the markup shrinks with it, and nobody enjoys pitching a smaller paycheck, so the idea tends to stay in the drawer.

We were built to make money another way. Our margin lives in the efficiency, so a leaner network is good news on our side of the table too. That’s why our team flags a backhaul that cuts your spend and our load count in the same breath.

Grill any provider on how they get paid when your total cost of ownership goes down.

If the answer needs a whiteboard, you’ve found the reason nobody’s mentioned a backhaul. Our margin keeps us pointed in the same direction as you, and that’s what a true freight management relationship looks like.

4. We Look at Your Whole Network Before Rates

A lowest-bid RFP asks every lane the same question: What’s the cheapest truck? Never will you hear: “Where does that truck go next?” That’s exactly where backhauls hide, and it’s why low-cost transportation strategies built on rate alone keep missing them.

We start from the other end. We load your origin-destination file into KBX TM™, our own TMS, and plan it alongside the freight we already run across truckload, rail and intermodal, and the railcars, trailers, and chassis we manage.

Seeing everything together is what network optimization means in practice. Your lanes stop competing with each other for the cheapest rate, and we finally notice the backhaul that’s been sitting in your data. Sometimes it turns out to be a lane that belongs on rail.

5. A Paid Trip Home Keeps Your Trucks Showing Up

We also push backhauls because we’ve been the shipper when capacity got tight.

A lane with a paid trip home holds up when the market turns, because the carrier wants that freight, and wanting it is the only loyalty you can count on.

MIT researchers asked whether carriers reward shippers who treated them well in soft markets, and their paper’s title, “Elephants or Goldfish?”, gives away the answer. Carriers have short memories and take the freight that pays best now.

This latest cycle proved it. Tender rejections peaked above 17.5%, and FreightWaves found shippers paying up just to keep routing guides intact. A backhaul built into your lane costs less than a premium rate to hold capacity, and we learned that by paying for both.

Stop Managing Freight. Start Managing the Business.

That’s why the backhaul still comes up with us after the contract’s signed. We raise it because we used to pay for empty miles; we have freight to fill them; we earn more when your network runs lean; we plan the whole network; and we know what a paid trip home does for your capacity.

Even Koch companies get surprised by what a hard look turns up. 

On the Halsey project, Georgia-Pacific’s Jim Lowman told our team, “I didn’t think there would be much opportunity here … but clearly, there is a big opportunity.” That work took 57% out of conveyor shipping costs, and your network is probably hiding something too.

Finding it takes network optimization and a managed freight provider that treats your network like its own. Get that right, and your team can stop managing freight and start managing the business.

If you’re comparing providers, start with our six questions for evaluating a 3PL. If you’d rather see what a shipper-built 3PL finds in your lanes, contact us to learn more and bring a lane list. We’ll start with the trucks leaving your customers’ docks empty.

The post Why a Koch-Owned 3PL Raises the Backhaul Opportunity You’d Miss appeared first on KBX.

But plenty of supply chain leaders spend their time tendering loads, chasing trailers that missed their appointments, and arguing over detention with a carrier rep they’re now on a first-name basis with, whether they wanted to be or not.

Somebody has to do that work, and it shouldn’t be you.

The hours you spend keeping loads alive come straight out of the network plan, which is the thing your CFO asks about when freight runs over budget. It’s hard to win a strategic seat at the table when you keep stepping out to take a carrier’s call.

This article makes the case for handing off the execution and keeping the decisions, starting with what all that firefighting is costing you.

What Does Freight Firefighting Cost You?

It costs you time, money, and good standing with the executives who set your budget. Your invoices only showcase the financial piece.

The hours are the easiest to count: if rejected tenders, detention disputes, and “where’s my truck” calls eat around 12 hours a week, that’s about 600 hours a year, or 15 workweeks spent as the most senior person on hold.

Then there’s the money, which leaks out through rush fixes. A load covered at the last minute moves at whatever the spot market says it’s worth, and a missed delivery can turn into an expedite nobody budgeted for. Both get pricier as capacity tightens, and the September Logistics Managers’ Index showed transportation capacity shrinking for 10 straight months.

The standing hurts most, because executives judge you on the network plan and the freight budget, and firefighting leaves little room for either. Gartner’s Lindsay Azim described the squeeze at the firm’s Orlando symposium: “We’re juggling two timelines at once, delivering today while knowing we need to prepare for what’s next.”

Why Is Freight Management a C-Suite Issue Now?

Because freight got expensive enough this year that executives started reading the freight line, and logistics was already at the top of their cut list.

Diesel hit $6.53 a gallon on September 21, a record for the 32 years the EIA has tracked it and 89% above January’s low, according to EIA data compiled by USAFacts. EIA’s October 5 average of $6.20 hasn’t calmed anyone down.

The pressure to cut was there before the fuel spike too. Gartner’s 2026 supply chain outlook, published last November, names logistics as the top target for cost reduction, and CSCMP’s 2026 State of Logistics Report describes a market in which disruption and volatility have become permanent features.

So expect the CFO to keep asking about freight, and don’t answer with a rate sheet. Detention, empty miles, reweighs, and claims can make cost per load look fine while total cost bleeds, and the leader who can explain that walks in with a strategy instead of a cost variance.

How Do You Free Leadership Time From Freight Operations?

Hand the execution to a managed freight provider and keep the decisions that shape your network, so carrier calls go to people who are paid to take them. The split usually looks like this:

• You keep: network design, mode mix, service levels, and the freight budget.
• The provider runs: tendering, tracking, exceptions, and carrier sourcing, and brings you backhaul and consolidation ideas to approve.

If you can’t tell where something belongs, ask whether it changes what your network will cost next year. If it does, it’s yours, and if it only decides which truck backs into door 14, let it go.

You keep control by judging the provider on network results instead of load counts, the way our total-cost view does with accessorials, deadhead, claims and expedites, and on-time in-full.

Hiring another freight person tends to move the problem down the hall, because the hard calls still find their way back to you. A team built for systematic execution takes them off your plate.

What Should You Do With the Time You Get Back?

Spend it on the two things that earn you a seat at the executive table: network decisions that keep getting reopened and freight costs nobody’s found yet.

Network decisions tend to loop: in a Gartner survey of 151 supply chain leaders, 72% had to revisit a final network investment decision, and more than 50% went back three or more times. Gartner’s advice is to price chronic turbulence, premium freight included, into the business case, which is hard to do between late-truck calls.

Hidden freight costs are the other prize, and equipment purchases are a good place to dig, since makers often bake shipping into the price. When freight threatened to blow the budget on Georgia-Pacific’s™ facility modernization in Halsey, Oregon, our team reviewed lanes and trailer types, questioned standard rates, and swapped flatbeds for Conestogas. We wound up cutting conveyor shipping costs by 57%.

Walk into a budget meeting with a number like that and the questions get a lot more interesting. Our outsourced freight ROI guide shows how to find yours.

Where Does KBX Logistics™ Fit In?

We take the execution pile, and you keep the decisions. 

Our team runs your loads on KBX TM™ and KBX Track™ and brings you the backhaul and rail-versus-truck calls worth approving. It’s the model we built inside Koch before we sold it to anyone, and we run it on 8,000 domestic loads a day.

Everyone who moves your freight makes a margin, us included. Ours comes from taking waste out of your network, starting with empty miles, which keeps us pointed in the same direction you are.

We take on the emergencies too.

In October 2024, as Hurricane Milton intensified, our team moved DEPCOM™ Power’s 15,180-pound uninterruptible power supply enclosure by roll-on/roll-off vessel from Jacksonville, Florida, to Salinas, Puerto Rico, and it arrived on time. Koch’s own companies made the same hand-off, and we’ve been running their freight ever since.

Contact us to learn more about KBX freight management. Bring the five lanes that give you the most grief, and we’ll show you where we’d start.

The post Stop Managing Freight. Start Managing the Business. appeared first on KBX.

Every truckload move needs four things: a driver, a truck, a trailer, and freight.

Everything else adds cost. That doesn’t make it unnecessary, but it does mean every additional service, platform, and provider should be able to clearly explain the value it creates. I have been saying that for most of my career.

Before joining KBX Logistics™, I spent 12 years in operations at a national truckload carrier. That experience taught me to evaluate freight from the ground up. The driver, the tractor, the trailer, and the miles carry the freight. Every dollar layered beyond this has to earn its place.

Over the two decades, and more rapidly over the last 7 years, a growing number of services, technologies, and intermediaries have emerged between the shipper and the truck. Most were created to solve a real problem, and many continue to deliver meaningful value. But over time, individual solutions can become permanent line items, long after anyone stops asking whether they’re still worth the cost.

Each of those services is another party to the transaction, and each must show what it adds.

KBX should be held to the same standard.

In fact, I regularly ask that question about our own business: What value do we create by standing between a shipper and the carrier moving the freight? If we cannot answer that clearly, we haven’t earned the right to be there.

Our job is simple: create enough value for our customer that working with KBX is better than managing that same network independently. And we take out the services in the chain that stopped adding enough value to hold their place.

Price is one of the things we add. Ease and peace of mind is another.

A shipper should find that going through KBX is easier than assembling the same coverage alone, and easier is a claim that you can check against your own team’s hours.

Shipment visibility is one of the clearest examples.

We can go directly to a carrier for status and keep third parties out of that exchange. When a company’s whole job is to carry a status message from the carrier to us and from us to a shipper, it’s charging to relay information that already exists.

Consolidation illustrates the opposite outcome.

Combining multiple LTL shipments into a truckload removes waste and lowers total transportation cost. In this case, the additional service creates more value than it consumes.

Shippers can apply this same exercise to their own networks.

List every party that touches a load, every platform, every service. Then, ask a simple question: What would we lose if this disappeared tomorrow?

Plenty of added services answer the question well, and the safety and compliance work answers it most often.

Cost reduction should never come at the expense of safety, compliance, or risk management, and I would not run this exercise looking for cuts. Some of what reads as overhead on an invoice is the reason a load arrives without a claim.

The driver, the truck, the trailer, and the load.

Everything else exists because someone believes it creates more value than it costs.

That includes KBX.

The moment we stop asking whether a service, technology, or provider is earning its place is the moment it starts becoming overhead instead of value.

I’d rather have that question asked of us every year than assume we’ve already answered it.

Tracy Reiss
SVP Transportation
KBX Logistics

The post A Driver. A Truck. A Trailer. And Freight. Everything Else Has to Earn Its Value. appeared first on KBX.

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

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

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

The Challenge:
High-Growth Markets Required a Stronger Model

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

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

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

The Solution:
From Lane Execution to Strategic Network Support

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

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

The Impact:
Better Positioned to Serve Customer Demand

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

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

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

A Logistics Network Built for What’s Next

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here are five steps to change the conversation.

1. Start With the Numbers Your CFO Already Cares About

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

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

That’s the conversation worth having.

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

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

2. Call the Freight Market Before It Calls You

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

Truckload offered a pretty clean example this year. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So put the alternatives in business terms instead.

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

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

4. Put a Dollar Figure on Freight Risk

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is the step that makes the other four possible.

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

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

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

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

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

Freight Outcomes Are the Shortest Path to the Executive Table

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s how I lead transportation for KBX.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We’ve seen this cycle before.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tracy Reiss
SVP Transportation
KBX Logistics

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

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

Then the market moved.

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

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

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

The Truck Surplus Is Gone

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

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

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

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

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

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

When Spot Beats Contract, Lowest Bids Get Rejected First

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

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

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

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

Record Carrier Costs Set a Floor Under Every Freight Bid

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

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

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

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

Which brings us back to Memphis. 

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

Montgomery and Cargo Fraud Made Carrier Vetting a Procurement Issue

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

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

Your legal exposure got more complex too.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Comes After Lowest-Bid Freight Procurement?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No, and you never did.

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

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

So why does the migration pitch keep showing up?

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

If the TMS is Fine, What’s Broken?

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

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

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

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

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

What’s the Junk Drawer Really Costing You?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Changes When a 3PL Surrounds Your Shipper TMS?

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

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

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

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

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

Could software do our part? Some of it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why Would KBX Logistics Tell You to Keep Your TMS?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bring us your Tuesday number →

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

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

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

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

Transportation just got its version of that math.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Annant Patel
Chief Commercial Officer & Asset Strategy Leader
KBX Logistics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Annant Patel
Chief Commercial Officer & Asset Strategy Leader
KBX Logistics

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

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

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

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

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

My test is core competency.

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

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

The long stretch of cheap trucks is likely ending.

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

Cycles will keep coming, both up & down.

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

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

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

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

Your partner should treat it differently.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Annant Patel
Chief Commercial Officer & Asset Strategy Leader
KBX Logistics

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