The Use of Common Carriers to Control Internal Capacity: A Survey of the Industry

The use of common carriers to supplement private and dedicated resources has increasingly become a strategy that many transportation providers are utilizing to control internal capacity. This problem has been addressed in the literature, but primarily from a cost perspective. We utilize a survey of industry participants to gather data on the maturity of this process in practice, as well as the drivers that are most influencing the decision of what routes to assign to private/dedicated resources versus common carriers. The results show a primarily manual process, as decision models do not currently incorporate the customer service and asset utilization factors that practitioners say are driving this decision. We then discuss how this is an opportunity to develop analytic solutions that allow transportation providers the ability to improve implementation of this very important decision.