al direction of the freight economy, continues to point toward
steady business activity,” said company CEO Kirk Thompson
in a statement announcing Hunt’s third-quarter results.
Slicing and dicing
The dedicated model doesn’t work for everybody. For one
thing, it carries some risk for shippers. In a dedicated
arrangement, customers are contractually committed to
pay for all their miles—whether they can find freight to fill
them or not. Paying for empty backhauls can be a costly
proposition, and in a tough economy, it’s a gamble not all
companies are willing to take.
In addition, dedicated carriage relies on symmetry—
trucks returning to origin—and not every routing is structured in such a fashion.
“The main limiting factor in dedicated is physical connectivity,” says Thomas K. Sanderson, president and CEO of
Transplace, a Frisco, Texas-based asset-light 3PL whose
services include dedicated carriage. Transplace manages
inbound flows to DCs for its retail customers and coordinates with a network of truckers—for hire, private, and
dedicated—for store deliveries.
Providers have gotten creative in an effort to surmount
these obstacles and are leveraging their entire customer
base to execute. For example, Transplace will pair up two
different customers operating in the same lane and build a
dedicated operation that would not have been possible with
the loads from just one customer. Transplace also contracts
for 60 trucks with four carriers and guarantees them a cer-
tain number of paid weekly miles. It then scans what
Sanderson calls its “basket” of freight to find loads that can
fill the backhaul and reduce its empty miles.
