Check Call: Gather round the crystal ball

Welcome to Check Call, our corner of the internet for all things 3PL, freight broker and supply chain. Check Call the podcast comes out every Tuesday at 12:30 p.m. EST. Catch up on previous episodes here. If this was forwarded to you, sign up for Check Call the newsletter here.

In this edition: 2024 predictions coming in hot; new TRAC Market Dashboard debuts; and TFI is on the prowl again.

Gather around the crystal ball, it’s time for the hot takes and medium to large predictions for the supply chain in 2024. 2024, there’s a lot of hope for you to be better than 2023. This year companies might have become more guarded and thinking more about staying alive than originally anticipated. I’m thinking 2024 will start to turn the tide.

2024 I foresee as more of a securing the battlements kind of year, enforcing the foundation of organizations and looking strongly at internal processes. What’s working? What’s slowing people down? Where are the pain points? Whether that looks like retraining, establishing training processes or investing in new technology who knows?

Some tech integrations could be on the chopping block. As some companies look to refine internal processes and find the empty promises or not fully integrated systems, I’d expect some hesitancy to renew contracts. On the flip side, if there is a tech provider that isn’t holding up its end of the bargain, it’s time to have a conversation about why it is unable to do that and how it might be time to reevaluate the partnership.

Also making waves in 2024 is going to be reverse logistics. More and more shippers are going to want this solution solved, since it is arguably one of the most difficult things to do well — whether it’s returns for an e-commerce shipper or committing to a sustainability promise to reduce waste and find a solution for products after their life cycles. Whoever figures out how to do this well and in a scalable way stands to make an obscene amount of money from it.

The last and final is less of a prediction and more of a hope — a hope that those who have promised after the pandemic to have more resilient and efficient supply chains have actually accomplished those goals. As 2024 sees a heavy amount of reshoring, nearshoring, wrestling with the aftermath of labor disputes and the rising effect of geopolitical unrest, it’s shaping up to potentially be quite the test for supply chains and their resiliency.

Here’s hoping the last few years have taught us a few things and, more importantly, we learned.

TRAC Tuesday. Well, would you look at that? The SONAR TRAC Market Dashboard took the phrase new year, new you literally. The new and improved market dashboard is here. (If it’s not here for you yet, no worries it’s coming.) This week we’re looking at an Atlanta to Chicago lane. The 679-mile trip between two major freight markets hasn’t seen much of a recovery since a pre-Christmas spike. Right now the all-in rate is about $1,114, before margin, which translates to about $1.64 a mile.

Outbound tender rejections are on the rise in Atlanta as the index has crept up to 3.66%, which is a 37 basis point increase week over week (w/w). Chicago also saw a massive increase in OTRI as a result of the Christmas holiday as rejections shot up to 5.73%, a 234 basis point increase w/w. The brief tightening in capacity is all a factor of the holiday and shouldn’t have any long-term implications to the spot market.

Who’s with whom? TFI international, most infamously known for acquiring UPS Freight, the former LTL arm of UPS, a few years ago, has set its sights on a new target. The new deal is for flatbed truckload carrier Daseke for $1.1 billion. Most of the deal will be in cash and debt. Daseke will continue to operate its various brands and will report financial results through TFI’s TL unit. This acquisition comes after Daseke spent the last few years cost cutting and cleaning up past integrations of its own acquisitions.

Quoted in FreightWaves’ Todd Maiden’s article, Alan Bédard, chairman, president and CEO at TFI, said, “This attractive acquisition is highly complementary to our existing operations and scales our Truckload segment into a leading North American truckload transportation and logistics business.”