“3PL UP” With FreightRun

Posted On 15th July 2018

We have many 20-year veteran shipping, traffic, logistics, and supply chain managers (collectively known as freight buyers), who tell us the following:

“We have two carriers we have used for the last 10 years with nearly zero claims and great pricing. We will keep your information on file, but we ran rates on your website and found them to be much more money than what we pay now.“

Of course, this is an excuse, and this person is not meeting their obligation as a freight buyer. Their duty is to provide the most competitive shipping rates possible to their customers and/or their own company – it is even possible to make shipping a profit center if they are sufficiently aggressive.

These freight buyers are not even attempting to negotiate, and they know well that regular repeat shippers/receivers can get huge discounts off the list prices displayed on the FreightRun website if they tell us how much they ship, what they ship, some sample BOLs, etc. Once they provide a minimum of data to us, more than likely we can significantly beat the prices they have now. Repeat freight buyers with FreightRun can run leaner shipping and customer service departments or even outsource a lot of what they do to FreightRun.

FreightRun provides a unique opportunity for freight buyers, as we obtain pricing from various sources, including forwarders and direct carriers; booking with FreightRun allows you to “3PL Up” - and achieve lower pricing and higher productivity if you also leverage the pricing with a shift of responsibilities to the FreightRun team.

Relying on a few carriers and continuing to accept their general rate and fuel surcharge increases without putting out your shipments to a competitive bid makes no sense. Yes, the relationship with the sales rep is nice and occasionally useful but you do not lose that with FreightRun. Our team is available nearly 24/7 and has more human hands per shipment available, following up on your shipment constantly.

The trend for truckers and the largest 3PLs is to combine and vertically consolidate shipping from door to door within the US and internationally. As a result, you cannot price out the components competitively, and the efficiencies of the supply chain automation will go (mostly) to THEIR bottom line, not yours.

The US spot market for full loads and its equivalent for LTL truck loads offered at FreightRun enables you to use the vast power of the free market to achieve the results you need.

A system like FreightRun can compare your direct carriers next to the market price of all the other carriers on one screen. You can choose the carrier, or you can delegate that job to your favorite FreightRun team member who will apply your specified criteria.

Effectively, we can become your cost plus fixed markup partner - all efficiencies and windfalls of lower priced supply chain go to your company. FreightRun’s marketplace harnesses the power of the price discovery mechanism to drive the efficiencies created by innovation in the supply chains to your company’s bottom line.