Research: Leading Shippers Use These Truckload Supplier Strategies

While this percentage may seem shockingly low at first blush, it makes good sense that Perfect Truckload Shipment scores will be lower than the individual performance metrics that are part of the total. That’s because there are three factors that could potentially go wrong before you achieve a Perfect Truckload Shipment. In fact, the highest-performing Leaders in our research achieve Perfect Truckload Shipments of 82.1%; Laggards achieved 46% Perfect Truckload Shipments.

C.H. Robinson Truckload Performance Rating™

In the research, a strong indicator of a shipper's route guide performance was to award suppliers focused roles in the route guide. 

Suppliers naturally have more assets in some lanes than others; some focus their efforts in a smaller geographical coverage area. Matching their strengths with your service corridors leads to better performance.

The principle also applies to larger suppliers with wider geographical coverage. They, too, have certain lanes where their focus makes them a “regional leader,” which makes them a more appropriate strategic choice for specific lanes. They may have less-than-stellar performance in some areas where they do not have that focus, but their access to a larger number of assets may make them the best choice in lanes that need broader coverage, even where freight is spotty.

Leaders engage suppliers who fit into specific strategic roles to optimize their service levels while fulfilling all the truckload demand from different geographical areas.

It’s important to note that this research provides valuable insights, but isn’t the definitive last word. In research projects, timeframes are finite—in this case, the length of a school year. Students explored the data through the lens of a focused question, but each observation can raise even more questions.

For instance, midway through this project, students found that there were two distinct sets of Leader shippers who had obtained nearly identical Perfect Truckload Shipments. One Leader group used 30 suppliers per facility, and the other used 7. Both groups used a combination of asset carriers and brokers. But one of the Leader groups used a 70/30 split respectively, and the other, 31/69. The students spent the time they had left trying to learn more about the attributes of the freight that had been tendered to asset carriers and brokers.

They discovered that regardless of whether the service suppliers were asset based or brokers, shippers in both Leader groups achieved more Perfect Truckload Shipments when they used acknowledged service leaders for those lanes—suppliers who simply perform better. Conversely, Laggard shippers appeared to choose service suppliers who have a pattern of underperformance; those shippers obtained less than stellar results.

Researchers found that Leaders had certain freight attributes that worked together to improve freight performance. These included longer lead times, consistent load volume, geographic and lane focus, younger price ages, and using a mix of both asset carriers and brokers.

Another discovery: asset carriers at first appeared to have significantly better first tender acceptance than brokers. But when the students examined underlying demand trends for brokers, they found that lanes and volumes tendered to them were not as consistent over time as the lanes and volumes given to asset carriers; this means that the percent of portfolio of loads brokers hauled that had lumpy demand and/or short lead time was higher than the asset carriers. The students concluded that more volatile and less predictable shipments made it more difficult for brokers to guarantee first tender acceptance. They suggested that shippers score asset carriers and brokers differently, such that the scorecards respect the portfolio of freight awarded to each service community.

Given more time, the students could have dug deeper into the actual freight attributes for Leader shippers. But as the students said in their thesis, future research would have to delve into topics like comparing the impact of location, economic seasonality, weather-driven industry shifts, geographical performance, and market impact on the Leaders’ strategies.