Reduce freight costs through optimized load planning and carrier selection
Infios Transportation Management (TM) reduces your freight costs by automating load optimization, carrier rate comparison and tendering, giving your transportation and finance teams visibility into cost drivers before a shipment is booked.
Your freight costs are shaped by a large number of individual planning decisions. Partially filled trailers, missed consolidation opportunities and limited carrier rate visibility each add cost in isolation and compound as your shipment volume increases.
Infios TM addresses both sides of this equation: how your loads get built and how you select carriers, using one systematic, cost-driven process.
The challenge: manual planning and reactive carrier selection inflate freight spend
Transportation costs rarely increase because of one major issue. More often, they rise through small inefficiencies repeated across thousands of your shipments: partially filled trailers, missed consolidation opportunities, poor carrier selection and repeated tendering cycles.
Without a modern Transportation Management System (TMS), you plan reactively, without visibility into rates and carrier performance.
Manual load planning limits equipment utilization
When your transportation planners build loads manually, individual shipments get the attention. The network-wide view gets lost.
Common challenges include:
Underutilized trailer capacity from manual load building
Missed shipment consolidation opportunities across your orders
Shipping deadlines driving your planning decisions more than available capacity
Limited visibility into multi-stop routing or backhaul opportunities in your network
Empty miles that increase your supply chain costs without adding customer value
As your shipment volumes grow, these inefficiencies compound and increase freight spend across your network.
Limited rate visibility leads to higher transportation costs
You probably choose carriers based on historical preferences or existing contracts, and current market conditions rarely factor in.
Your transportation teams frequently struggle with:
Comparing carrier rates in real time before a tender goes out
Understanding spot market opportunities
Selecting contracted carriers by default when alternatives are available at a lower cost
Evaluating transportation cost across multiple routing options
Without comparing carrier rates and multi-modal options before tendering, you miss opportunities to optimize freight spend.
Reactive tendering reduces carrier performance
Carrier selection should balance cost, service and tender acceptance probability.
In practice, you're likely dealing with:
Multiple re-tendering cycles after carrier rejection
Premium-priced last-minute bookings
Carrier selection decisions that vary across your planners
Manual, reactive tendering increases your transportation costs while cutting into operational efficiency.
Small inefficiencies create significant financial impact
Every partially filled trailer, premium-rate booking and empty mile in your network adds to higher freight costs.
For you, that means:
Increased spend across your supply chain
Eroded margins across your transportation lanes
Disrupted transportation budget plans
Reduced ability to control costs as shipment volumes increase
Missed sustainability goals for limiting empty-mile fuel use and emissions
Negotiating better carrier contracts alone won't control your freight costs. Protecting your supply chain spend depends on optimizing every transportation decision before shipment execution.
The solution: how Infios TM reduces freight costs through load optimization and carrier selection
Infios TM addresses load planning and carrier selection together, connecting each capability directly to a cost driver that affects your bottom line.
You get a structured, repeatable approach to reducing freight spend across your network.
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Infios TM uses advanced load optimization to build loads that maximize your equipment utilization while identifying opportunities to consolidate shipments across your order book.
Transportation planners can:
Improve your trailer utilization
Consolidate compatible shipments
Reduce the number of partially filled loads
Increase efficiency across your facilities and regions
Optimized load planning reduces your transportation costs while improving overall network performance.
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Choosing the lowest cost requires visibility into your available options.
Infios TM performs carrier rate comparison across contracted and spot market carriers before tenders are issued. You make carrier selections based on current conditions, with full visibility into existing contract rates alongside them.
As a result, your transportation teams can determine the best balance of cost, service and availability. Beyond individual tender decisions, this rate visibility strengthens your contract negotiations and vendor performance management at the procurement level.
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Transportation efficiency in your network extends beyond individual shipments.
Infios TM identifies opportunities to:
Route multi-stop moves
Plan backhaul loads
Improve equipment utilization
Reduce empty miles
These optimizations improve your fleet efficiency while lowering transportation costs across your network.
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Manual tendering slows your execution and often leads to carrier selection that varies planner to planner.
Infios TM automates your tendering process by ranking carriers based on:
Transportation cost
Service requirements
Lane performance
Predicted acceptance likelihood
Automated tendering speeds up execution and makes your transportation planning more repeatable.
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Carrier rejection creates unnecessary delays and drives up your costs.
Infios TM analyzes historical carrier performance to help you improve your tender acceptance rate, identifying the combinations of carrier, lane and pricing most likely to get accepted on the first try.
Higher tender acceptance reduces your re-tendering cycles while cutting down on expensive last-minute spot market bookings.
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The lowest carrier rate doesn't always mean your lowest transportation cost.
Infios TM gives you cost-to-serve visibility by comparing total landed costs across routing, carrier and service options before shipments are tendered.
Transportation leaders gain greater financial visibility, and your planning decisions get more repeatable as a result.
A plan written for last year's risks does not flex for this week's disruption.
Contingency plans are built for anticipated scenarios that rarely match what actually occurs
Planning teams evaluate response options sequentially, under time pressure, without visibility into downstream impact
The data needed to model alternatives sits across Warehouse Management System (WMS), Transportation Management System (TMS) and Order Management System (OMS) platforms, and pulling it together costs time you don't have
There is no way to simulate the cost and service impact of a response before committing to it
Most plans assume normal baseline conditions, which is rarely true at the exact moment disruption hits
Business outcomes
Using Infios TM for load planning and carrier selection
With Infios TM, you can turn freight cost management into a repeatable, network-wide discipline.
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Transport planners
Transportation planners build loads and select carriers with visibility into cost, capacity and acceptance likelihood before a shipment is tendered.
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Logistics directors
Logistics directors use this visibility as a shared basis for planning decisions across facilities and regions
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Procurement teams
Procurement teams gains a clearer, ongoing view into how contracted rates compare against the market, strengthening negotiating position
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Finance leaders
Finance leaders can trust freight spend forecasts as a reflection of real planning discipline
Use cases in action: load planning and carrier selection
Global supplier automates tendering and cuts costs
Facil's transportation operations were slowed by manual less-than-truckload (LTL) tendering, which drove up costs, increased supplier workload and left inbound shipments with no visibility. Integrating API-based LTL rating information with Infios TM automated tendering and surfaced cost-saving opportunities. Facil achieved 12% annual cost avoidance in its LTL shipment spend.
Measuring freight cost reduction
If you're focused on continuous transportation optimization, measure both financial performance and planning efficiency.
Key transportation KPIs include:
Monitoring these metrics helps you continuously refine planning strategies, improve carrier selection and identify new opportunities to reduce transportation costs.
Reduce freight spend through better transportation decisions
Lower transportation costs are not achieved through a single optimization project. Instead, you reduce freight spend by making better planning and procurement decisions across every shipment.
See how Infios TM can help you reduce freight spend through load optimization and carrier selection.
FAQs
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A TMS reduces freight costs by automating load building and rate checking, optimizing trailer utilization, comparing carrier rates in real time and ranking tenders by cost and acceptance likelihood before a load is booked.
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Load optimization automatically builds shipments to maximize trailer capacity and identify consolidation opportunities across an entire order book, spanning every region and order pool.
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Carrier rate comparison shows contracted and spot market rates side by side before a tender is built, surfacing cheaper options on that lane before the pre-set contracted rate gets used by default.
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Tender acceptance rate is the percentage of freight tenders a carrier accepts on first offer. Low tender-acceptance rate forces repeated re-tendering, which often ends in last-minute, premium-priced bookings. Improving the tender rate directly reduces both cost and planning time.
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Multi-stop and backhaul planning identify opportunities to combine shipments or fill a truck's return leg, reducing empty miles. Fewer empty miles mean lower cost per shipment and better asset utilization without adding capacity.
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Trailer utilization rate and tender acceptance rate tend to move fastest and are the clearest early signals. Both reflect planning decisions that change immediately using automated load optimization and rate comparison. Freight cost per shipment typically follows once upstream planning improvements start compounding across the network.
Additional Resources
- Blog
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A carrier went dark at dawn. Here's what your AI should do next.
Intelligent Supply Chain Execution for carrier disruptions
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Billerud
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Making the case for an enterprise TMS
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Transportation Management capability scorecard
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