Is there a better LTL pricing scheme? The long and winding road to cube- and density-based pricing

摘要

Freight pricing has been an interest of mine for many years, particularly the pricing of less-than-truckload freight. This somewhat ambiguous category encompasses shipments weighing typically between 100 and 10,000 lbs. A white paper entitled, The Path to Density-Based Pricing: Connecting Domestic LTL Pricing to the Global Supply Chain, published by SMC3 in 2008, places the current status of LTL pricing in the US in context: "Over the past two decades, globalization of the supply chain, industry consolidation, and competition in the freight transportation marketplace have brought sweeping changes to the less-than-truckload (LTL) industry, In this era of dramatic change in our nation's business climate, there is one system that has not experienced any fundamental alteration - the industry's traditional classification-based rating structure... A holdover from the railroad era of the early 20th century, the classification-based pricing system is confusing to the non-expert, costly to implement, and difficult and burdensome to manage. Furthermore, some argue that it produces pricing that bears little relationship to actual transportation costs and that it hinders the LTL industry's ability to compete against air freight and parcel carriers.