White Paper

How to Choose the Right Shipping Modes to Enhance the Way You Ship Your Freight

Words from Founder

For leading brands, transportation is the largest and most complex expense to manage. However, partnering with a 3PL provider can significantly reduce these costs and streamline shipping operations.

In this whitepaper, we provide valuable insights into how outsourcing logistics and scaling up with the latest technology can help shippers optimize capacity in real-time. By working with a 3PL provider, businesses can benefit from the provider’s expertise, access to a wide carrier network, and advanced technology solutions.

How to Choose the Right Shipping Modes to Enhance the Way You Ship Your Freight

In today’s shipping industry, there are numerous transportation options available for shippers, such as truckload (TL), less than truckload (LTL), and intermodal shipping. To ensure optimal results, it’s crucial to have a comprehensive understanding of all modes and possibilities. However, obtaining and analyzing all this data can be a challenging task. As per industry experts, the demand for 3PL services will continue to rise in the coming years as businesses increasingly rely on logistics specialists to manage their supply chains effectively. This is where working with a 3PL provider can be advantageous. They offer a wide range of multimodal shipping capabilities that can help optimize your logistics operations and streamline your supply chain management.
According to industry experts, many companies outsource their logistic functions to 3PL services due to the benefits of having more efficient distribution networks. By partnering with a 3PL provider that offers multimodal shipping capabilities, businesses gain access to specialized expertise and logistics networks that can manage the scale of supply chains and logistics operations required. Additionally, 3PL firms can negotiate better rates with carriers and suppliers, enabling small, midsized, and large-scale companies to benefit from volume discounts.

In recent years, supply chain disruptions have become more prevalent, prompting shippers to seek ways to improve their processes. Many companies face constant pressure to reduce transportation costs and may prioritize selecting the shipping mode that is the least expensive.

Technologies have revolutionized the logistics industry by enabling constant communication and seamless connectivity between shippers and carriers. By leveraging technology, businesses can capture, centralize, and analyze critical data that impact their logistics operations. However, when shippers work directly with different carriers, accessing key shipment information such as real-time load tracking, navigation, load status, and data-driven insights can be a challenging and time-consuming process.

Working with a 3PL provider that manages all shipments across all modes of transportation and deals directly with carriers on behalf of their clients can simplify this process. With a 3PL as a single point of contact, businesses can easily obtain shipment information for all their shipments. Moreover, technology enables quick and secure data exchange between systems, streamlining the supply chain management process.

At T3RA Logistics, we offer leading brands access to real-time capacity with seamless logistics operations backed by our AI-powered, data-driven Ship With T3RA Logistics platform. This ensures safe and timely freight shipping for all our clients, every time.

In order to maximize the benefits of a multimodal transportation strategy, the size and scale of a shipper’s logistics operations matter. Implementing a multimodal shipping strategy directly with carriers can be difficult for a single shipper without the support of an established 3PL provider.

For example, a shipper’s negotiating power with LTL carriers is largely determined by the volume of freight carried. If a shipper uses a truckload carrier for some of that volume, their negotiating power with LTL carriers is reduced. However, by working with a 3PL provider, a shipper can carry out a multimodal strategy without losing negotiating power with carriers.

Partnering with a reliable 3PL provider such as T3RA Logistics offers businesses the freedom to choose the shipping method that will be most effective for each shipment, while also utilizing the 3PL’s carrier network and access to capacity to achieve the best cost-effective rates on transportation solutions. This allows shippers to optimize their logistics operations and benefit from the expertise and scale of a 3PL provider.

Ship with T3RA Logistics