How Data and Analytics Are Changing Mid-Market Transportation: A Chairman’s View

Give me a mid-market food company’s freight data, and I can usually find six figures it didn’t know it was spending. Not because anyone was careless, but because a freight invoice is built to show a total, not the dozen places that total went wrong.

I’ve sat across the table from a lot of these CEOs. The freight cost climbs, the CFO wants to know why, and the supply chain lead, who’s sharp and working half to death, can show what was spent but not where it went. That was the most honest answer the mid-market had.

What’s changed is that the guessing can finally stop. The data and the analytics to take a freight network apart, lane by lane and accessorial by accessorial, now exist where they never used to. And a real divide is opening between the companies that put that to work and the ones still running off a freight bill and a hunch.

Putting it to work is the whole business at NT Logistics. We’re the plug-and-play managed transportation department tailor-made for the mid-market. NTelligence, our transportation analytics, finds where the money’s leaking, and our freight execution goes and stops it. More than $2 billion in managed spend has run through that pairing.

Let me walk you through five things I’m watching happen, and what each one means if you’re the one running the company.

Hidden Freight Cost Is Finally Visible

Every load you move costs more than the invoice says: the fee when a truck waits too long at a dock, the half-empty trailer you paid full price for, the freight your suppliers fold into what they charge you for the goods. None of it shows up on the bill.

Add it all up, customer by customer and lane by lane, and you get your true cost-to-serve: what each part of your business really costs to move. Most companies have never seen that number. The trend is that they finally can do so, because the analytics now build it from their own data.

We did this for a food manufacturer not long ago. We rebuilt the true cost of the freight hauling their ingredients in, and found $600,000 they were overspending, with $1.25 million more still on the table. It was never hidden. They just had no way to see it.

Owning the Tools Is No Longer the Edge. Reading Them Is.

You’d think the answer is just to buy the software and look. Most companies already have. Ninety-six percent of transportation teams run AI somewhere now, so transportation analytics is everywhere. And everywhere is the opposite of an edge.

The part that trips people up is this: owning the tool and knowing what it’s telling you are miles apart. Barely 1-in-10 of those AI projects ever produces savings you can count. The software shows you a route that went over budget. It won’t tell you why, or that it’s about to happen again.

What you can’t buy is the person who reads it. It takes someone who has priced 10,000 loads to look at that route and know what to change. That reading is the whole game now, and we put real people, with real expertise, behind it.

Talent to Read the Data Won’t Fall Into Your Lap

The catch with that person is that they won’t come to you. Someone who can find the real money in a freight network and rebuild it is rare, and everyone wants them. They go to the giants, the national retailers, and the big carriers. A $50 million food company was never on their list.

Not to mention, the competition for them is only getting stiffer. The number of jobs that need both freight savvy and serious data skills has jumped 387% in three years. Gartner studied the hiring data and put it plainly: there aren’t enough of these people to go around, and you can’t hire your way to them.

None of that is your fault. The market is just built this way. So I tell the companies we work with what I’ll tell the whole industry as TIA’s incoming chairman: this talent has to be brought in ready-made, and the operators who do it are pulling away from the ones still trying to build their own.

Analysis Without Execution Is Just an Expensive Slide Deck

Now, suppose you have both the data and someone who can read it. There’s another trap, and I’ve watched plenty of sharp operators walk right into it. A firm spends three months studying your network, walks you through a polished report on what’s wrong, and leaves you to go fix it yourself. Most never do.

This is where most analytics projects fall apart. More than 40% of them get abandoned before they ever change how a single load moves, usually because nobody owns the step between finding the problem and fixing it. A report that shows you where the money is going does nothing until someone goes and gets it.

We don’t leave that gap open. At NT, the people who run your freight and the transportation analytics that find the leaks are the same shop. So when we spot a route losing money, we fix it that week, not in next year’s follow-up. 

That’s how our customers take 8-12% out of their freight bill.

Now That the Leak Shows, Waiting Costs Real Money

Put the first four together, and waiting stops being free. When you couldn’t see where the money was going, pushing the decision to next quarter cost you nothing, you could point to. Now you can point to it. The leak you found this quarter is still running next quarter and the quarter after that.

And it gets more expensive the longer it sits. Every new customer, lane, and supplier leans on a setup that was never built to carry it, so a one-off problem hardens into a permanent one. Meanwhile, your room to absorb the cost is shrinking: most supply chain leaders expect tariffs to eat their margin by the end of the year.

The most expensive freight network in the country is the one nobody is measuring. It loses money on a schedule, a little at a time, through dock fees and bad routing that look like ordinary business until you add them up. The longer that runs, the bigger the bill the next person inherits.

Where This Leaves the Mid-Market

None of this is complicated, in the end. A surgeon who needs an operation doesn’t do it on himself, however well he knows his body. He finds the specialist who does that one thing all day, and he lies down. Running your own freight network without the talent to read it is the same move, with worse odds.

That specialist is what we are. NT Logistics has spent 28 years being the freight department for midsize companies: the analytics that find the money, the people who go take it back, all in one shop. Every company we’ve done it for came out paying less and running better.

So before someone upstairs asks you what changed this year, go find out what your freight’s been hiding. Ask us for a free assessment of your data, and we’ll hand you your number.