As 2025 comes to a close, many organizations are asking the wrong question about transportation spend.
It’s not, “Can we get better rates next year?”
It’s, “Is our freight budget structurally built to perform—or are inefficiencies from prior years already baked into it?”
For many CFOs, COOs, and supply-chain leaders, year-end reviews revealed a familiar frustration: even in a softer freight market, transportation budgets failed to deliver the savings forecasts suggested they should.
Why Freight Spend Didn’t Perform in 2025
On paper, 2025 should have brought relief. Demand softened. Capacity loosened. Carrier competition increased. Spot rates fell below contract pricing on select lanes.
Yet total freight spend remained flat—or worse.
The issue wasn’t the market. It was execution and network design.
Savings assumed during budgeting were quietly eroded by accessorial creep, service failures, mismatched carrier fit, and routing decisions that no longer reflected how the business actually operates. Transportation wasn’t “out of control”—it was under-designed.
Why Freight Is One of the Least Controlled Variable Costs
Transportation is one of the largest non-labor variable expenses, yet it’s governed by thousands of decentralized daily decisions.
Most organizations attempt to control freight through annual RFPs and average rate assumptions. But rates alone don’t determine total landed cost. Mode selection, service levels, carrier performance, network design, and execution discipline all matter—and when they aren’t aligned, costs leak consistently without triggering budget exceptions.
Finance teams approve budgets based on assumptions. Operations teams override them to protect service. Over time, those micro-decisions erode forecast confidence and leave few levers when spend drifts off plan.
Networks Built for Disruption Don’t Support Today’s Budgets
Many supply chains are still optimized for conditions that no longer exist.
During years of disruption, networks expanded rapidly. Once conditions normalized, they were rarely rebalanced. Freight continued moving through suboptimal lanes. Premium modes became the default. Service levels exceeded what customers actually required.
These costs don’t always stand out individually—but they compound.
Static routing guides and one-size-fits-all logistics models optimize price per shipment, not cost per outcome. Over time, that mismatch forces organizations to “buy their way out” of structural inefficiencies.
What We Consistently See Across Complex Shipper Networks
Across multi-site and national distribution networks, templated RFPs treat lanes as interchangeable—even though they aren’t. Marginal rate improvements show up on paper, while total cost rises due to accessorials, carrier churn, and service volatility.
When networks are redesigned around current demand patterns—and lanes are segmented by freight characteristics, service requirements, and carrier fit—transportation shifts from a transactional activity to a controlled financial system. Organizations reduce total spend, improve on-time performance, and regain predictability without changing the customer promise.
Designing Freight Budgets That Hold
RedStone Logistics approaches transportation from a cost-structure perspective—not a rate-first one.
By engineering logistics strategies around lane-level cost drivers, freight characteristics, carrier performance fit, and execution discipline, we help organizations redesign transportation as a durable financial lever.
This approach consistently delivers high-single-digit to double-digit freight cost reductions—often in the 10–35% range—not through market timing, but through structural improvements that hold across cycles.
Why This Moment Matters
As 2026 budgets are finalized, inefficiencies are either corrected—or permanently embedded.
This is the window where finance and operations can still realign assumptions, pressure-test cost drivers, and redesign networks before next year’s numbers harden into expectations. The organizations that outperform don’t wait for better market conditions. They fix the structure.
Is Your Freight Budget Built to Perform in 2026?
If transportation spend didn’t perform the way forecasts suggested it should, the issue may not be rates—it may be design.
A targeted freight network evaluation can uncover embedded savings opportunities, increase forecast confidence, and position transportation as a controllable financial lever heading into 2026.