Freight Procurement

Freight procurement is the discipline of building and managing the carrier network that moves your product. It encompasses everything from the annual RFP and carrier evaluation through contract execution, routing guide management, and ongoing rate optimization. Done well, procurement directly controls the largest variable cost in most shippers' supply chains. Done poorly, it leaves money on the table and creates operational headaches that cascade through the logistics team.

The procurement cycle typically follows a rhythm: an annual RFP establishes the baseline carrier network and contract rates, a routing guide translates those awards into operational assignments, and then ongoing management – tracking compliance, monitoring market rates, running mini-bids, addressing service issues – keeps the strategy aligned with reality. Each phase depends on data from the one before it. You can't build a smart routing guide without good RFP data, and you can't manage the guide effectively without visibility into how it's actually performing.

For mid-market shippers, freight procurement often falls on the same people who are also planning loads, tracking shipments, and resolving exceptions. The strategic work – analyzing lane economics, benchmarking rates, evaluating carrier performance – gets squeezed out by the daily operational grind. This is the gap that automation and analytics are designed to close: handling the transactional procurement work (rate comparison, tender execution, invoice validation) so the team has time for the strategic work that actually moves cost.

The shift from reactive to strategic procurement is one of the highest-value transformations a logistics team can make. Shippers who treat procurement as a continuous process – not a once-a-year event – consistently outperform those who set their routing guide and forget it until the next RFP.