Just about every mid-market shipper has hidden inefficiencies somewhere in its freight network. Most show up as unnecessary transportation spend—but they also create complexity, reduce flexibility, and make the network harder to manage.
What’s strange is that rates have been soft for two years, and the bills climbed anyway. This past quarter, shippers paid 21.8% more than they did a year before to move roughly the same volume, and when finance comes around asking what changed, the supply chain lead can pull the lanes and the carriers and the rate sheet and still not land on an answer. The leak is smeared across the whole network, sitting in a dozen small places no one has been paid to watch, or had the visibility to connect.
So you go looking for all of them at once: the accessorials, the freight classes, the way the lanes are drawn, and the freight your suppliers bury in the price of your goods. That’s the role NT Logistics plays. Using NTelligence analytics, our team evaluates the entire freight network to uncover hidden opportunities, then works alongside you to implement the changes that capture those savings.
Lynn Gravley, who founded NT in 1999 and is about to chair the TIA, puts it the way only he would: running your own freight without that is like a surgeon operating on himself.
After you’ve taken apart enough of these networks, the leaks stop surprising you. It’s the same five spots. Four of them never show up on a rate sheet, and the fifth is the reason the first four go unnoticed for years.
Freight picks up charges on the way through that never made it into the quote. The dock’s backed up, so you eat detention. Somebody eyeballs a pallet weight wrong, and you get hit with a reweigh. Add reclass fees, limited-access charges, and a fuel surcharge still running off a table from two revisions ago, and the real number drifts well past anything anybody agreed to.
By the time the invoice turns up, three weeks after the load gets delivered, the person in AP cutting the check has no memory of the quote, so it just gets paid.
Not to mention, the bills aren’t clean to start with. Roughly 80% of carrier invoices carry a discrepancy somewhere, LTL accessorials have climbed 8-12% this year, and a good number of shippers have watched theirs double outright.
On a lean team, nobody has the hours to fight every line, and carriers price like they’re counting on it.
Lots of overpayment here comes down to habit. Eight pallets keep shipping LTL because they’ve always shipped LTL, when they’d ride cheaper on a consolidated truckload. A reefer lane gets billed on a freight class that somebody set years ago, before carriers went to density-based pricing and the old class stopped matching the freight. From the floor, it all looks normal, which is the only reason it lasts.
But the raw numbers don’t care about habit. Move a shipment up one freight class, and the rate jumps 10-20%. LTL pricing hit record highs in 2026, up 5.2% over last year even in a soft market, because carriers now price every load on density and what it actually costs them to haul.
This is the big one, and often overlooked.
When a supplier ships you ingredients or packaging on “prepaid and add” terms, they pay the carrier and fold the freight into your unit price, usually with a markup running anywhere from 5-100%. Procurement spent its energy negotiating the price of the goods. Nobody ever pried apart the freight hiding inside that price, because the system files it under cost of goods, not transportation. So it never reads as a freight expense, and it sits there year after year.
This is the exact place where we helped a food manufacturer uncover $1.25 million in savings. The play was simple enough. Pull the freight back out of supplier pricing, move it onto NT’s own rates, and rebuild the picture as total landed cost, the real cost of getting one case to the dock, once every dollar is counted. That money had been there the whole time. It just took someone reading the invoice the right way to see it.
A freight network usually gets built once, and then nobody touches it again.
The lanes made sense for the customers and suppliers you had the day you set them up. Then the business moved on without telling the network. You picked up a couple of retail accounts, opened a second DC, swapped a co-packer, and the routing guide fell behind reality. Now you’ve got trucks deadheading on the backhaul, lanes that only run heavy in one direction, and whole regions where rates crept up while everyone was looking somewhere else.
It compounds the moment capacity tightens, and 2026 has been a bad year for that. Carriers are turning down far more freight than usual. Rejection rates have sat in the 13-14% range through the first part of the year, against the 5-8% that’s normal for the season, and every load that bounces gets rebooked on the spot market at whatever the day costs.
Every one of those four hides for the same reason. A company watches its freight through the invoice and the lane, because that’s what the system in front of it shows. What it never shows is cost-to-serve, the real cost of moving freight down to the case or the pound, with the accessorials and the mode penalties and the supplier markup all stacked back in.
Most mid-market teams have never seen that number for their own freight, and they’re not unusual. Only 41% of companies have line-item visibility into their spend, while the best-run ones sit at 93%. You can run a freight operation you can’t fully see. You just can’t fix one.
None of this calls for tearing out what already works. NT starts by reading the network you’ve got, then goes after the money in the same order every time.
Freight gets more expensive every year you can’t see where the money’s going. Carriers price every load on cost-to-serve now, so the shipper who can’t see their own cost-to-serve is the one who pays for it.
Naturally, the fix is people who can see all of it. But good luck hiring them. The people who model total landed cost and redraw networks for a living work at the biggest shippers and providers, and a $50 million food company can’t get one anywhere near its payroll.
That’s what NT Logistics is for: the freight team a mid-market shipper can’t build alone, running on 28 years and better than $2 billion in freight under management, with the analytics to find the money and the people to go bring it back.
You’re already running your own freight network. The one thing you don’t have is the specialist who can see where it’s bleeding. Run it without one, and you’re operating on yourself.
Want to see where yours is leaking? Talk to us at NT Logistics and put your real freight through the analysis, not some industry benchmark.
7460 Warren Parkway, Suite 301
Frisco, TX 75034
Toll-free: 800.801.5970
Dallas Area: 469.362.5000
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