This week’s guests are my two DAT iQ colleagues: Ken Adamo, Chief of Analytics, and Dean Croke, Principal Analyst. This is our annual end of the year podcast where we revisit our predictions from last year, discuss the major issues of the current year, and take our best guesses as to what will happen next year.   As always our conversation ranged wide - to include the continued soft market of 2024, challenges of current air travel, predictions of a rising market in 2025, the impact of the election, and the misery of being an Ohio football fan.  Our predictions from 2023 for the spot market were pretty much dead on - while our contract forecasts were slightly off the mark.   

This week’s guest is Rob Haddock the recently retired Group Director of Planning & Logistics at Coca-Cola North America.  In his retirement, Rob has started a new firm (Albedo Logistics), begun consulting projects on the side, and written a book!  

I asked Rob to join me on the Freightvine to discuss his book, titled, Transportation Adventures of a Food Shipper: A Shipper’s Guide to Truckload Transportation - The Sapient Shipper Adventures.  Rob has distilled his almost 40 years of experience in the freight trucking and supply chain  industry and instilled it into his book.  In our conversation, we talked about how transportation executives should communicate up to their C-suite, the importance of having intellectual curiosity and willingness to ‘break things’, and the need for an organizational ‘plan on a page’ to act as a north star to guide strategy and actions.  Rob also discussed how he believes that Artificial Intelligence is akin to Iron Man’s AI equipped suit, J.A.R.V.I.S., in that it can make an executive or manager be better and smarter at their job.  Not as a replacement.  

This week’s guest is Kevin Zweier, Vice President of Transportation Practice at NTT, formerly Chainalytics.   Long term listeners might recall that Kevin has actually been on the Freightvine 3 times: pre-pandemic in 2019, during the pandemic in 2021, and in the post pandemic in 2022.  Now that we are apparently ending the pandemic induced TL market cycle, it is time to bring him back again to talk about how shippers’ TL Procurement strategies are, or should be, changing.    

During our conversation, we discuss the current TL market cycle, the impact of low lane volume strategies on the RFP process, and how shippers are taking risk off the table when it comes to bids.  Finally, we debate whether it is better to expand or contract a carrier base as the market starts to turn inflationary.   It is always a great time to talk with one of the leading experts in freight transportation.    

This week’s guest is Tim Denoyer, VP and Senior Analyst at ACT Research.  Tim has been a financial analyst covering the transportation space for pretty much his entire career.  At ACT Research, he is the lead analyst in their transportation research effort and is the primary author of the ACT Freight Forecast, U.S. Rate and Volume Outlook.  In our conversation, we talked about the current state of the TL market, the rise of private fleets, and why he views it as “revolutionary change at an evolutionary pace.”  We also discuss automation versus Artificial Intelligence and the lag in productivity gains following the implementation of any technological innovation.  

This week’s guests are Chad Kennedy, Senior Product Manager at DAT, and Samuel Parker, Associate Director Shipper Segment at DAT.  Chad and Samuel hosted and ran the most recent Shipper Summit in Kansas City, which had close to 100 shipper customers.  As the kick-off event of DATCON each year, the Shipper Summit is an invitation-only, shipper-only event that features expert panels on procurement and transportation management as well as a forum for peer-to-peer discussion on a variety of pertinent topics.  The following two days of DATCON featured speakers and discussions on a range of topics from AI to cybersecurity.   In this episode, Chad, Samuel, and I discuss the highlights of the Shipper Summit and DATCON and share the key takeaways from this unique event.

This week’s guest is Dr. Erika Voss, Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) at DAT.  Erika joined DAT earlier in 2024 as our first CISO coming from a long career in security and risk at companies such as MicroSoft, Salesforce, Oracle, and CapitalOne.  In her role, she is really changing the game in cybersecurity for the entire trucking transportation industry.  Erika explains that the types of fraud and theft that occur in our industry are all essentially cybersecurity issues.  Interestingly, the introduction of greater digitalization of operations, while greatly increasing efficiency, has a dark side in that it opens the door for potential cybersecurity breaches.  In our conversation, we discuss the concepts of each person’s ‘identify fabric,’ how the ‘attack landscape’ for companies has expanded dramatically over the past several years, what ‘zero-trust’ transportation with continuous authentication might look like, and exactly what a ‘script kiddy’ is.  Finally, we talk about how a shipper should include cybersecurity capabilities as part of their carrier and broker vetting for any RFPs.  As shippers, carriers, and brokers continue to automate and digitize various functions, the importance of cybersecurity is only going to increase.  

This week’s guest is Bill Cassidy, Senior Editor for Trucking and Domestic Transportation at the Journal of Commerce.  Bill has been covering transportation for over 30 years writing and editing at Fleet Owner, Transport Topics, Traffic World, and now for the last 10+ years at the JOC.  He has a great perspective on all things freight.  In our conversation we discuss the potential impact on the transportation industry of different events to include the Federal Reserve recently voting to lower interest rates by a half-percentage point, the potential strike of the International Longshoremen's Association union impacting the east and gulf coast ports, the pending changes to the de minimis exceptions for customs, and the recent downsizing trend of TL carriers.  Finally, we talk a little about the use of AI in transportation and in media in general. 

This week’s guest is Felipe Capella, CEO and co-founder of LoadSmart. After 10 years as a lawyer, Felipe decided to start a company to build something along with his co-founder, Ricardo Salgado. They chose freight transportation since it has a huge total available market, is highly fragmented, and was ripe for technological improvement. They initially started out as a brokerage but over the last ten years they have grown LoadSmart into being a platform that provides, among other things, TMS software as a service, managed transportation, brokerage services, and dynamic algorithmic truckload pricing. Recently, they have added two versions of generative AI to their platform: Co-Pilot which enables plain language querying of a shipper’s data within their TMS and, most recently, Freight Intel AI which makes proactive recommendations on a shipper’s network based on an analysis of their actual transactions.  In our conversation, we discuss how the truckload and brokerage market has evolved over the last decade, the importance of context when generating a rate, the growth of algorithmic spot pricing, and where AI should (and should not) be used within supply chains.  

This week’s guest is Dr. Alex Scott, Associate Professor of SCM at UTK and co-founder of Sustainable Logistics. There is growing pressure on companies - both regulatory and socially - to reduce the emissions that they generate. One of the largest sources of CO2 emissions is freight transportation. Unfortunately, most companies outsource their transportation to carriers - so they do not have direct control over the asset being used. These types of emissions - where the company is responsible for it but does not have direct control over the asset - are referred to as scope 3. They are the hardest type of emissions to measure.  In our conversation, Alex describes how Scope 3 emissions are currently being measured today, discusses the regulatory trends in emissions monitoring, and explains the trade-offs between reporting accuracy and cost of collection. Through his research and now his company, Sustainable Logistics, Alex has developed a better approach that improves the accuracy of the measurement of Scope 3 emissions from truck transportation. This is an issue that is only going to become more critical for all transportation executives, so I encourage everyone to take a listen.  

This week’s guest is Josh Brogan, Partner at Kearney. Josh is one of the lead authors of the recently released CSCMP’s Annual State of Logistics Report titled “Waiting for the tide to turn”. As most listeners probably know, the report is authored by the management consulting firm Kearney and presented by Penske Logistics. The conversation, while focusing mainly on the report itself, meandered through other topics including reshoring trends, potential consolidation of the 3PL or Lead Logistics Provider sectors, the increasing need for rapid network flow analysis for shippers, and the blending of asset and non-asset-based providers. The report has a ton of great information - we encourage everyone to reach out to CSCMP and read the report.