Key Signs You Need Managed Transportation

You’ve been thinking about outsourcing your transportation for months now — maybe longer. But every time you get close to making the call, something stops you — the cost, the loss of control, the fear that an outside partner won’t care about your freight the way your team does.

Fair enough. Handing over your supply chain to someone else is a big move. 

But wake up to the reality of what’s probably happening right now: Your team is drowning in carrier calls and shipment tracking while your freight costs keep creeping up. You’re patching problems instead of preventing them. And the stuff you actually need to focus on, like building capacity for growth, fixing your network, or cutting real costs, keeps getting pushed to next quarter.

Managed transportation might be the answer, or it might not. It depends on where you’re at. But if you’re seeing certain patterns in your operation, the decision gets a lot clearer. Let’s walk through what those patterns look like.

Key Sign 1: You’re Constantly Firefighting Shipments

First pattern: Your phone never stops — late appointment changes, missed pickups, another “where’s my truck?” email from your customer. Your team tracks shipments across three different email threads and two Excel files because nobody has time to update the system properly.

Supply chain teams waste about 14 hours a week manually chasing down data that should be automatic. Meanwhile, drivers sit detained at 39% of stops. Carriers bill detention fees on almost all of them, but you only recover payment on half. That gap costs the industry $11.5 billion in lost productivity, and a chunk of it is coming straight out of your budget.

You know you’re stuck in this cycle when expedite requests become routine, when you’re approving accessorial charges after shipments deliver, when your customer service team spends half their day hunting down ETAs. 

Key Sign 2: Your Team Has No Time for Strategic Work

All that firefighting leaves zero room for anything else. 

Your carrier scorecards sit untouched for months. Network design stays parked on the backlog. Someone keeps saying they’ll analyze your milk run opportunities, but hot loads always take priority.

Here’s why: 56% of logistics teams spend more than 31% of their time on manual data entry and shipment tracking. That’s a third of every workday (or more) spent updating systems and chasing information instead of improving your operation. 

Your analysts can’t evaluate mode shifts or pool point strategies. Your leadership can’t see the real cost to serve because the data sits scattered across systems. Even COOs end up stuck between damage control and building something better.

Key Sign 3: Freight Costs Keep Creeping Up with No Real Analysis

When your team has zero bandwidth for strategic work, freight spend becomes a black box. 

Your per-mile rates inch higher each quarter. Accessorials pile up. But you can’t see patterns across modes, lanes, or carriers because the data lives in 10 different places. Freight bills get approved on trust and a quick scan because nobody has time to dig deeper.

Companies that implement proper freight audit and visibility tools recover 1-4% of their transportation spend every year. First-year recoveries often hit 7-10%. Some operations find up to 8% in savings just from getting clear visibility into where money goes.

But it’s all for nothing when the leaks add up: misrated invoices that nobody catches, duplicate bills that slip through, detention and layover charges that should have been disputed, routes that cost more than they should, and contract capacity you’re paying for but never using.

Key Sign 4: You Keep Missing Delivery Targets and Customer SLAs

All those cost leaks and firefighting sessions show up in your delivery performance. Your OTIF scores slip. Customers start asking pointed questions about your reliability. Retail partners send penalty notices.

Walmart dropped its OTIF requirements to 90% on-time and 95% in-full (down from 98%), but still hammers suppliers with 3% COGS penalties when they miss. Amazon expects around a 93.5% rate and will restrict your account if you fall short. 

Either way, you’re losing money and credibility.

The damage compounds fast. Chargebacks eat your margins. You lose shelf space to competitors that deliver on time. Your vendor scores tank. Then you start expediting shipments to save orders, which drives up costs and puts you right back in firefighting mode.

How Managed Transportation Fixes These Problems

You’ve probably recognized your operation in at least one of those signs — maybe all four. The good news is that managed transportation providers built their entire business model around solving these exact issues. Here’s what changes when you hand over the reins:

• Someone Else Owns the Daily Grind. Your team stops chasing carriers and tracking shipments. The provider handles appointment scheduling, carrier communication, exception management, and all the grunt work that eats up 14 hours of your week. 
• Your Team Gets Time to Think. Freed from manual tracking and data entry, your analysts can finally tackle the projects sitting on your backlog. Network optimization, mode strategy, pool point design, bid preparation — all the work that cuts real costs and builds capacity for growth.
• You See Where Every Dollar Goes. Managed transportation providers audit every freight bill, catch duplicate charges, dispute bogus fees, and give you unified visibility across all your modes and lanes. Those 7-10% first-year recoveries come from finding money you didn’t know you were losing.
• Your OTIF Scores Stop Sliding. Managed transportation providers have deep carrier networks, backup capacity, and technology that spots problems before they wreck your delivery windows. They get penalized when you miss targets, so they’re motivated to keep your customers happy.
• You Scale Without Hiring. Volume spikes during peak season? New distribution center coming online? The provider absorbs the extra work without forcing you to staff up, train new people, or add head count you won’t need in three months.

Know When to Call for Backup

You don’t need to check every box to know you’re ready for managed transportation. Maybe your team is drowning in carrier calls. Maybe your freight costs feel like they’re on autopilot with nobody at the controls. Maybe your OTIF scores keep you up at night. If two or more of these signs sound familiar, you’re past the point where toughing it out makes financial sense. The cost of doing nothing — burned-out staff, missed targets, money leaking out of your freight budget — adds up faster than the cost of handing execution to someone who deals with this chaos every single day.

NT Logistics handles transportation for mid-market shippers who need national reach without building a massive in-house operation. We’ve got a vetted network of over 10,000 carriers, dedicated logistics solutions that flex with your volume, and NTelligence, a platform that turns your freight data into decisions you can act on. Your team stops firefighting. Your costs get visible. Your OTIF performance stabilizes. 

Contact NT Logistics today to start a practical assessment of where your operation stands and what managed transportation could do for you.