A rejected load costs up to 20% more: port bookings, the cab screen and ship documents

This week FreightWaves put numbers on what a carrier rejection costs: a load accepted on the second try costs the shipper about 9% more, and on the third try or later almost 20% more. Alongside it came news about port bookings, a screen in the truck cab, electronic ship documents and digital twins of warehouses. For the owner of a company that hauls or ships anything, the common point is this: a rejection, a reschedule and a carrier swap are statuses, each one has a price, and the system has to know what happens next.

What a rejection costs

On October 23, FreightWaves presented three new sets of Sonar indices. The premium for a second attempt to tender a load is now 9.25%, against a 12-month average of 8.77%, and for a third attempt or later it's 19.84%. 89.29% of loads are accepted on the first try, compared with about 93% a year ago. New contracts are being re-signed 13.11% above previous rates: the highest since early 2022 and almost four times the five-year average of 3.47%. Julie Van de Kamp of Sonar added that if your first-try acceptance rate is falling faster than the national one, you should look for the problem in your own routing guide.

Three days earlier, on October 20, FreightWaves showed the picture for reefers in the US: 21.44% of tenders were rejected as of October 20, after a peak of 22.13% on September 17. The cause is seasonal: the harvest in the Pacific Northwest and poultry from the Midwest ahead of Thanksgiving. Reefer spot rates are up about 28% since the start of the year, contract rates 9%.

Where the status enters the system

The Loadstar reported on October 20 that WiseTech connected its CargoWise Landside TMS with Dray Dog, a booking service for marine terminals. The dispatcher gets a confirmed appointment with its number right in their own system, with no manual entry. The note gives no details on how the integration works.

On October 20, FreightWaves described PACCAR Connect: starting in early 2027, Kenworth and Peterbilt trucks will get a factory screen with an app platform, covered by the factory warranty. The portal puts vehicle health, remote diagnostics, mileage, location, warranty and idle time in one place. There are no prices, and PACCAR didn't list which devices can come out of the cab. For a carrier the point is the same: the truck's condition reaches the system on its own, without a call to the driver.

On October 20, Alta-Soft reported that Russia's Ministry of Transport has proposed moving more than 20 ship documents to electronic form: the classification, passenger and tonnage certificates, the load line certificate, and international certificates on environmental protection and dangerous goods. Each document gets an electronic signature, its own number and a QR code, and its status is checked online. The switch will happen in stages.

On October 22, Logistics Manager wrote that Primark chose Kallikor and is building digital twins of its distribution centers: layout and flow options are tested on the model before any capital spending. There are no results yet; the project is just starting.

Example: a farm in season

Take a farm that ships vegetables in reefers in September. Right now one in five such loads in the US gets rejected. The dispatcher calls a second carrier, who takes it for 10% more, and the load leaves. Only the final price stays in the spreadsheet. A month later the accountant sees a transport overspend, and nobody remembers why it happened. The first carrier's rejection isn't recorded anywhere.

Hence the rule: a “rejected” status with the date, the carrier and the reason should sit in the system next to the final amount. Then a quarter later you can see who rejects loads more often and what that cost you.

What I have: oil shipments and a rental calendar

For a very large holding company I built a calculator for the cost and volume of oil transportation, about $1,200 and 12 to 14 hours of work, and then an application for tracking oil shipments and analyzing deviations, about $14,000 up to the beta version. It runs on the company's own servers under its security requirements, and the project is ongoing. Deviation analysis means working with exceptions: the shipment plan says one thing, the actuals say another, and the system has to show the difference.

At a car rental company in South Africa, where I have been responsible for the website, integrations and business logic since October 2024, the most interesting task was the calendar. Some customers take a car for two days, others for two weeks, and empty days pile up between rentals. I set up the search results so that customers first see the cars whose free window fits their dates. I don't have downtime measurements, so I won't give numbers on that. But cars are handed over 3 times faster, the average check grew by 30%, and maintenance costs fell by 25%.

For a manufacturing company I built a program that merges several orders so that identical parts and identical processing go to subcontractors together: one order takes 65 seconds instead of 4 to 5 hours.

What I would do

Set up shipment statuses with transitions in the system: assigned, rejected, reassigned, confirmed. Each transition gets a date, who made it and why.

Calculate the second- and third-round premium from your own data, the way Sonar does for the market. If your percentage is higher than the market's, the cause is in your routing guide.

Take confirmations from outside systems, whether a terminal appointment or a signature on a document, into your own database along with their numbers. Email is a poor place to keep them.

I covered how to describe statuses and transitions like these in the article Business logic: rules, statuses and permissions. Earlier I wrote about how a TMS should handle statuses and exceptions and where to keep state between the CRM, a person and a worker. On the same topic: labor shortages in manufacturing and transit through Georgia and flow meters. Services: process automation and the business as one system. Projects: an order calculated in 65 seconds and car rental in South Africa. If rejections and reschedules at your company live in email and phone calls, tell me how shipping works today. Discuss your task.