Pricing

I was having lunch with a friend of mine who had recently conducted a transportation sourcing event. As we ate, he bemoaned the results of his recent attempt to obtain better rates through his company’s process. “Our rates are going up and the carriers are completely unwilling to negotiate with us—where did we go wrong?”

This new generation of buyers and analysts will have more visibility into not only their own order status, but also to a rapidly evolving marketplace and the forces that are making an impact on costs and services globally.

We’ve seen mergers of brokers and acquisitions by third-partly logistics providers (3PLs) indicating that this is a market with room for margin exploitation.

Effective Aug. 1, it’s going to be more expensive to ship air on ABF Freight System and other units of ArcBest Corp. The parent of the nation’s seventh-largest LTL carrier is joining most of the rest of the major players in the $36 billion LTL sector by introducing what it calls “space based pricing” – what most of the rest of the industry calls “dimensional” or “dim-weight” pricing.

According to the Association of American Railroads (AAR), intermodal rail traffic in March 2017 jumped 21% over February totaling almost 1.3 million units, representing a 4% increase over 2016 traffic and a new record in U.S. intermodal volumes.

This differentiator—this “wow”—lasts for a period of time, but eventually becomes a minimum expectation for the consumer and is later described as a “required feature.”

After announcing rate increases for various service offerings in early September, global transportation and logistics bellwether UPS recently announced additional pricing hikes on its website late last week.

Over the past decade we’ve seen a major trend in regards to safety regulations for freight transport within the United States as well as for import and export shippers—that trend is the “international­ization” of rules and regulations.

Perhaps the most significant change announced by FedEx is that fuel surcharges for FedEx Express and FedEx Ground will be adjusted on a weekly basis instead of the current process in which adjustments are made on a monthly basis with a two-month lag between U.S. government published fuel indexes and the fuel surcharges.

The brief period of bargain truckload rates that shippers enjoyed earlier this year is ending as carriers have reduced capacity to adapt to the slight drop in freight demand in 2016’s first half, says Werner's top executive.

The shippers locked into classic procurement and freight payment processes need to pay attention to the changes that are coming in transportation operations.

Pricing across the transportation modes, Trucking Pricing, Truckload Pricing, Air Freight Pricing, Air Cargo Pricing, Ocean Cargo Pricing, Ocean Freight Rates, Rail Freight Rates, Inter modal Pricing.

Satish Jindel, president of Pittsburgh-based SJ Consulting, says that one way for LTL carriers to improve both their bottom lines and overall productivity is to get a better grasp on the cost of handling a shipment and the pricing they have for it.

LTL carriers are rapidly investing in expensive, on-dock, three-dimensional size measurement capturing machinery, and they are hoping one day of being able to more accurately charge shippers rates based on the actual dimensions of their shipments, rather than the traditional weight-and-distance-based formula that has been in effect since the 1930s or even earlier.