What your freight data can tell you before your next rate review.

Each consignment generates a record with details such as origin, destination, weight, carrier, cost, surcharges, and delivery outcomes. Individually, these records are administrative, but collectively they give a complete view of your freight operations and offer objective insights concerning decision-making.

Many organizations do not analyze this data, commonly because of limited access or business demands. However, by focusing on a few key questions, you can gain significant value without a dedicated data team.

Here is how to focus your analysis.

Understanding your true costs by lane

A rate card shows the base rate, but your actual cost includes surcharges, remeasures, fuel levies, and accessorials. Calculating these for each lane and dividing by total freight moved reveals your true cost per kilogram. This figure often differs from the rate card and is essential to understand.

Analysing all your lanes reveals useful patterns. One lane may have higher surcharges than expected. A carrier that seems cost-effective on one route may actually be more expensive overall than another carrier you use elsewhere. Those insights do not appear on a rate card but are evident in your own data, allowing well-informed decisions.

Determining the best carrier for each lane

Many organisations rely on a well-known mix of carriers for different routes. Reviewing your data allows you to confirm these choices and may reveal lanes where another carrier offers better cost, reliability, or both.

Reliability is as important as price, yet it is often overlooked because it does not appear on the rate card. A low rate is no longer a saving if a carrier is late, damages goods, or loses them. Late or damaged deliveries directly affect your customers, requiring you to address issues and possibly harming future business.

Direct costs also accumulate, including redelivery fees, claims for damaged or lost freight, written-off stock, and additional service calls for technicians waiting on goods. This is where your data is most valuable. Tracking on-time rate, first-attempt rate, damage and loss rates, and average transit time by carrier, alongside cost, often changes which carrier appears most cost-effective.

Walking into a rate review with your own numbers

This is where your data becomes valuable. In many rate reviews, carriers are thoroughly prepared, while customers often have only a general sense of costs. Bringing your own data puts you on equal footing.

For example, you might present your volume on a specific lane over the past year, your effective cost per kilogram including surcharges, and the on-time rate compared to an alternative carrier. Showing an on-time rate of 82 per cent versus a competitor’s 94 per cent, at a higher total cost, provides a stronger negotiating position than simply requesting better rates. This approach regularly leads to better terms or a variation in volume, both supported by evidence.

Your volume is also important. Understanding your spend with each carrier shows the leverage you have in negotiations, which is often greater than it appears.

The key to effective analysis

All of this depends on accessing and working with your raw data.

Freight software can either support or hinder this process. Standard dashboards are useful for common questions, but the most important insights often require custom analysis. For these, you need access to the underlying consignment data in your own tools, such as a spreadsheet or BI platform, where your finance and operations teams already work.

A key question for any platform, including your current one, is whether you can export your full consignment history, with cost, surcharge, and delivery details intact, at any time and in a usable format. When you can, the data becomes something you can analyse, and that analysis is where the value lies.

A practical starting point

You are able to make significant progress with four key metrics from your consignments over the last six or twelve months: effective cost per kilogram by lane to understand true costs; on-time and first-attempt rate by carrier to compare cost and reliability; accessorial spend as a share of total freight to identify where surcharges accumulate; and volume share by carrier to assess your leverage. These insights require only your own data and a few hours of analysis.

Your consignment records have been accumulating over time. The step that turns this data into savings is simply to review and analyse it.

We have made it easy to export your full consignment history from Sentaro, rather than limiting you to a fixed set of reports, because the most valuable questions are often those no dashboard anticipates. Wherever your data resides, reviewing these four key metrics is worth your time before your next rate review.