Transportation Optimization

Transportation optimization focuses on getting freight from origin to destination at the lowest cost and highest reliability by making smarter decisions about how shipments are built, routed, and assigned to carriers. It sits at the intersection of load planning, carrier selection, and mode choice – and it's where shippers with high volumes can unlock the largest savings.

The mechanics involve several levers working together. Load optimization ensures trailers are filled efficiently using accurate product dimensions, weights, and stackability data – preventing wasted cube space and unnecessary extra trucks. Multi-carrier rate shopping compares contract rates, spot market prices, and LTL tariffs across the full carrier network to find the best option for each load. Order consolidation groups multiple shipments heading to the same region into fewer, fuller loads. Mode selection evaluates whether a shipment should move FTL, LTL, intermodal, or parcel based on cost, transit time, and service requirements.

Without optimization, shippers default to habit – tendering to the same carriers, shipping orders individually instead of consolidating, and accepting whatever rate comes back first. This is where the 5–15% in avoidable freight spend typically hides. Shippers managing 100+ loads per week who still build loads manually and shop rates by phone or email are leaving significant money on the table every single week.

AI has changed what's possible here. Platforms that read item master data can auto-calculate pallet configurations, query every carrier simultaneously, and recommend the optimal carrier-mode combination in seconds – work that used to take a logistics coordinator hours per load. The result is fewer trucks, lower per-unit costs, and faster execution.