Start with the customer: Sam Rowse on rethinking freight productivity

Start with the customer.

‍Speaking with ASCLA Director Rakesh Bandipelli, Sam explored what the Freightability Report tells us about reliability, carrier performance, freight costs and changing customer expectations. His takeaway was not to begin by asking what technology can do. It was to understand what the customer actually needs, then work backwards.

Reliability is changing the conversation

Across the network, deliveries arrive in full and on time, or DIFOT, around 78% of the time on average. Roughly one in five do not turn upas promised, and the average hides a wide spread, with the strongest carriers up in the high 90s and a long tail sitting well below. The finding that makes people sit up is underneath it: same-day services missed their promised day 30%of the time, compared with 19% for cheaper non-premium services.

For a customer paying more for speed, that raises a fair question about what they are actually paying for. "With the premium options, you're paying a premium to increase your chance of a mis delivery," Sam said. The cost of a failed delivery also runs well beyond the freight charge, from redelivery and customer service time to lost repeat business. InB2B it travels further still, disrupting warehouse staffing, store readiness and the next promise down the chain. Freight productivity cannot be measured on the cheapest rate or the fastest service alone. It has to account for whether the delivery promise is kept.

From choosing carriers to orchestrating them

The average Australian B2B shipper uses 5.4 carriers, which reflects the reality of the market rather than simple complexity. Different carriers perform differently across geographies, freight types and lanes, so the conversation naturally moved from carrier selection to orchestrating the whole network.

"It's not necessarily about going for the best carrier," Sam said. "It's the best carrier for the lane, for the job, to meet the customer's expectations."

That is orchestration in practice. The advantage is no longer how many carriers you hold, but how well you run the ones you already have, matching each movement to the right service on the right lane based on actual DIFOT and the full cost of the movement rather than an advertised speed or a familiar rate card. It is the difference between having five carriers and running five carriers.

And then there is AI

There is genuine potential for AI in freight, especially in flagging which shipments are likely to miss so someone can act before the customer notices. But by Sam's estimate only around 6 to 6.5% of freight is managed with that kind of insight today, which shows how much groundwork on data still comes first. And technology does not remove the human element.

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"AI is not going to ring a customer at four o'clock on a Friday afternoon telling them their freight's going to be delayed and try to smooth over the relationship," Sam said.

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Work backwards from the customer

The sequence Sam described is straightforward. Understand what the customer expects, learn how the relevant lane behaves, then choose the carrier best placed to deliver  against that expectation. Only then does technology enter, as the layer that puts it into practice: orchestrating the carriers you already have so each shipment goes out on the option most likely to keep the promise. As he put it,

" Focus on the customer and work your way back. At the end of the day, it's a shared customer. Your customer is the same as the carrier's customer.

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Watch the full fireside chat below for the conversation in full.

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