August rates went backward. September’s supposed bump never showed up. October’s almost here, and you’re still waiting for freight to pick up like it always does this time of year.
The numbers tell the whole story: Truck orders dropped 14% because nobody’s buying iron when loads pay less than last year. Brokers are quoting rates that make you wonder if they forgot that diesel costs roughly $4 a gallon. Shippers keep pushing delivery windows while squeezing pennies on every mile.
This freight market update brings rough news: Expect eight more months of this. The seasonal patterns you’ve banked on for decades just broke. Your competition’s already adjusting their cost structure, while others hope things improve magically.
Time to choose which group you’re joining.
Six Problems That Will Eat You Alive While Rates Tank
You know what makes a soft freight market worse? Running your operation like rates will magically bounce back next quarter. They won’t. Every inefficiency you’ve ignored, every manual process you’ve tolerated, every “we’ll fix it later” decision now costs real money you don’t have. So, let’s talk about the six problems crushing carriers and brokers right now.
Margins Don’t Exist
DAT’s numbers paint the picture: August spot rates dropped across the board. Van at $2.03, reefer at $2.41, flatbed at $2.49 all-in. Contract rates followed them down. Meanwhile, the Cass Freight Index shows shipments fell 9.3% year over year, while FTR’s Trucking Conditions Index hit -1.83 in June, the worst reading all year. The most recent figure available for July shows a marginal improvement to -1.03 from June’s disaster, but it’s still very negative.
And it makes sense why. Fuel costs are still high. Insurance keeps climbing. Driver wages won’t budge. Yet revenue per mile keeps shrinking. The math stops working when your operating ratio hits 98% and you’re burning cash to keep trucks moving.
Your Back Office’s Operational Drag
More than 70% of logistics leaders tell CSCMP they are desperate for automation because manual processes kill them daily. Invoice reconciliation takes weeks. Accessorial disputes pile up. Customs docs get lost. Your billing team spends more time chasing paperwork than collecting payments.
Every hour your staff wastes on data entry costs you $50 to $100 in labor. Multiply that across hundreds of loads monthly. Add write-offs from missed accessorials. Factor in 30-day payment delays because invoices sit in email purgatory. You’re bleeding thousands weekly through pure inefficiency.
Shippers Expect Amazon-Level Updates (You Give Them Radio Silence)
FedEx’s 2025 shopper study shows 68% of customers demand real-time tracking. Walmart still enforces 98% on-time delivery with 3% penalty fees. Miss an ETA update? Lost load. Forget proactive delay communication? Kiss that contract goodbye.
Brokers report 62% get dropped from RFPs purely for poor communication. Carriers with manual tracking lose 10-15% of bid awards. Your competitor texts ETAs automatically while you’re still calling dispatchers for updates. Guess who keeps the customer?
Your Data Lives in Seven Different Places
A recent MHI/Deloitte report shows 60% of logistics companies plan million-dollar tech spends just to connect their systems. Why? Because making decisions with fragmented data equals flying blind. Your TMS doesn’t talk to your ELD. Accounting runs separately from operations. Load boards exist in their own universe.
You can’t tell which lanes make money. Driver performance remains mysterious. Customer profitability remains rooted in questionable estimates. Smart competitors use integrated data to cherry-pick profitable loads while you take whatever pays fuel.
Cargo Thieves Got Smarter (You Didn’t)
CargoNet recorded 884 theft incidents in Q2 2025, up 13% year over year, with $128 million stolen. But the worst part is how innovative thieves have become. Identity fraud and double-brokering scams explode while you still verify carriers with a phone call. Thieves sell stolen ELD logins on Telegram. They clone MC numbers. They hijack email chains to redirect loads.
Every theft doubles your pain: lost freight plus OTIF penalties plus emergency replacement costs. Insurance rarely covers full losses. One strategic theft targeting your high-value load wipes out three months of profit.
Detention Bleeds You Dry Daily
Detention charges hit $75 to $300 per container daily while your drivers burn hours at docks. Midsize carriers and brokers can’t absorb these losses like mega-carriers can. You’re drowning in multi-contract detention terms, varying customer clauses, and tariff complexity, and thinking you can handle it all without embracing automation is fruitless.
Manual tracking means disputes you can’t win. No proof of wait times means eating costs instead of collecting fees. Your billing team wastes days reconciling detention claims while cash flow dries up. Delays cascade through your network, killing productivity. The inefficiency compounds daily, and manual processes guarantee you will never catch up.
The Seven Things Your TMS Better Do Right Now
Here’s the reality: Throwing money at consultants won’t save you. Hiring more back-office staff won’t fix broken processes. The carriers and brokers that survive this freight market update run modern, headless transportation management systems (TMS) that do the heavy lifting, offer actionable intel, and zero in on the following seven capabilities.
Slash Back-Office Costs Without Firing Half Your Team
Your billing department shouldn’t exist — seriously. Modern systems auto-rate everything from tariffs and spot markets, tender loads based on rules you set once, then handle carrier docs and freight payment without anyone touching a keyboard. Invoice cycles drop from weeks to hours.
Independent studies keep showing the same thing: Companies running modern TMS platforms cut operational expenses by double digits. Not because they fired everyone, but because five people doing data entry becomes two people handling weird exceptions while everything else runs itself.
Stop Losing Loads Over Communication Failures
Real-time visibility across every mode (truck, rail, ocean, air) feeds straight to customer portals they can actually use. No more check calls. No more “I’ll find out and call you back.” Live maps show everything. AI calculates ETAs that update when reality changes. Electronic proof of delivery ends the “Did you get it?” dance.
Walmart still hammers carriers with 90% on-time and 95% in-full requirements. Blow those numbers? Pay 3% of the load value in fines. Visibility platforms that actually work eliminate those penalties while your dispatchers do real work instead of playing telephone operator.
Finally Know Which Loads Make Money
One system holds all your data. Not seven. Not “mostly integrated.” One. Every shipment, rate, tender, and event lives in the same place, streaming to whatever analytics platform you prefer. Lane profitability stops being a mystery. Carrier performance becomes measurable. You see exactly where you win or lose against spot markets.
The 2025 CSCMP State of Logistics report keeps hammering this point: Data analytics separates survivors from casualties. When your TMS shows dwell time by facility, tender rejection patterns, and which customers actually pay detention, you make different decisions. Better ones.
Let Algorithms Handle Capacity While You Handle Strategy
The system scores the carrier acceptance probability before offering loads. “Book now” functions verify carriers and check insurance automatically. Rate guidance pulls from real market data, not last quarter’s wishful thinking. Digital freight matching runs around the clock finding trucks.
Brokers get AI that responds to carrier emails and texts without human intervention. The right truck for the right load at the right price surfaces without even trying. It’s no wonder that everyone is racing to add these capabilities because manual matching is a lost cause. Either your system does this, or your competitors eat your lunch.
Block Cargo Thieves Before They Clean You Out
Every carrier gets identity verified at tender. New MC numbers trigger alerts. Insurance gaps raise flags. Suspicious lane patterns get caught. CargoNet’s Q2 2025 data shows record theft levels, with NICB predicting another 22% jump coming. Identity fraud runs rampant.
One-time passwords protect pickups. Electronic BOLs create evidence trails with location stamps. High-value loads get IoT tracking. Route deviations trigger alerts before your load ends up in a warehouse in Miami you’ve never heard of. Security runs by default, not when someone remembers to check.
Switch Between Asset and Brokerage Without Switching Systems
Market conditions change faster than your contracts. Your TMS handles truckload, LTL, parcel, intermodal, ocean, and air through one interface. Fleet dispatch and brokerage workflows coexist. When truckload rates crater, you shift to LTL. When spot beats contract, you adjust immediately.
ACT Research shows flat rates and loose capacity through late 2025. The operators surviving play every angle: asset versus spot versus contract, mode versus mode, broker versus carrier. They pivot daily based on margins because their system allows it. Yours either enables this flexibility or locks you into losing positions.
Turn Detention Into Revenue Instead of Write-Offs
Appointment scheduling talks directly to yard systems. Geofences start and stop detention clocks automatically. You see which facilities and time windows cause problems. Accessorial charges for detention, TONU, and layover get captured, validated, and billed with supporting evidence.
Every claim comes with time stamps and electronic proof. Disputes route to the right people automatically. Oracle’s data shows shippers using these tools cut detention costs significantly. Meanwhile, you collect every dollar owed instead of eating costs because you can’t prove wait times. The money’s there. Your system just needs to grab it.
Your Move: Fight or Fold
It’s simple: Embrace a Modern TMS that goes all-in on the above seven solutions or close shop. Start with your data and pull everything into one system to see which lanes make money and which drain it. Once you know that, automation makes sense. The boring stuff that eats 80% of your day (invoice processing, status updates, document handling) runs itself while your team tackles real problems. Real-time visibility comes next because customers who can track their own freight stop calling every hour asking where it is. Security layers on top: Verify carrier identities before tender, not after your load disappears. Then AI takes over the midnight load matching while detention tracking proves every billable hour at problem docks. Each fix builds on the last, creating an ecosystem that runs without you babysitting it.
At EKA Solutions, we built our Omni-TMS™ and unified platform specifically for markets like this one. The proof’s already rolling: carriers scaling load counts 2.5x in four months, brokers cutting processing time 62% while growing volume 35% monthly. But every platform promises miracles. What matters is whether yours can execute when margins disappear and every inefficiency becomes fatal. And realizing that, as cutting-edge as your tech can be, it’s still your people at the end of the day that make it work.
Contact us to evaluate your cost and operations model against what’s actually possible today. A TMS assessment takes days. Rebuilding after bankruptcy takes years.