Make sure you understand how North American transportation rates affect your business performance in 2021. Our transportation management experts share their forecasts, industry analysis and actionable guidance to support your strategy for Parcel, LTL, Truckload and International transportation.
Companies across North America are seeing transportation costs rise as a percentage of their total costs. That’s driving a need for many business leaders to closely oversee their transportation spending.
Your organization can realize benefit from your Transportation Management System (TMS) on the first booked shipment. However, achieving broader, ongoing return on your logistics technology investment requires simple, but critical steps to support behavioral changes within your business.
Transportation Management Systems are more accessible to small and mid-cap companies than ever before. While that technology is one important piece in effective logistics management – it isn’t the only one. Solving your unique business challenges depends on what happens after you get a TMS login.
If anything, the year 2020 highlighted the ways life can veer dramatically from the expected. Along with its impact on health and the broader economy, the COVID-19 pandemic and resulting rise in online orders drove unpredictable growth and contributed to new demands on freight capacity as well as service challenges in the truckload (TL) and less-than-truckload (LTL) markets.
Consumers’ insatiable demand for e-commerce purchases, as well as rapidly deployed vaccine distribution will continue to create ripples across all transportation modes in the first half of 2021 and cause continued international shipping rates challenges.
Consumer demand shifts that accelerated during 2020 will have ongoing effects across the transportation marketplace, including continued capacity constraints in the less-than-truckload (LTL) market. Expect 2021 rate increases to reflect these pressures.
The unpredictability that characterized most of 2020 continues to make itself felt in many areas of business, including the truckload market. Spot rates are plateauing, but at a rate that’s about 30 percent higher than a year ago. Similarly, rates for flat bed shipments are up about 10 percent compared to a year ago, while rates for refrigerated truckloads have increased 20 percent during the same period.
When you approach the insource-outsource decision-making process, it is important to understand your own organization’s talent, processes, technology and culture. Hand-in-hand with that: know the capabilities a best-in-class service provider brings to the table.
When you are not accustomed to an outsourcing model the concept can seem pretty black and white. Either you outsource or you keep it in house. You do it, or somebody else does.
