NMFTA Launches Benchmarking Program for LTL Industry
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Less-than-truckload carriers have found a new ally in their quest for operational excellence: each other.
On Oct. 1, the National Motor Freight Traffic Association held its first meeting for a new benchmarking group aimed at boosting efficiency through shared insights.
“It really came from a small group of our members,” NMFTA Executive Director Debbie Sparks said. “They had been receiving, through another organization, very high-level numbers that they were able to look at quarterly. And they really wanted to go a little bit deeper to see what was really behind the numbers.”
The initiative requires participating carriers to sign confidentiality agreements and share operational metrics. NMFTA then aggregates this data, allowing members to compare their performance against industry benchmarks.
NMFTA is set to host three meetings a year with the group in conjunction with KSM Transport Advisors. The two-day meetings will each cover a general theme important to members while providing them an opportunity to review various key financial and operational metrics. The inaugural meeting focused on strategies for recruiting and developing pricing talent.
Henry
“It’s about developing your bench strength from a support staff perspective,” said Chris Henry, chief operating officer at KSMTA. “In LTL, pricing plays a very critical role in business development. You’re billing all those functions. There’s a lot of emphasis right now on what’s the best source of those people.”
The group discussed whether it’s better to recruit in-house or through external programs like colleges. Henry emphasized that future meetings will have defined themes, with different groups participating based on members’ needs.
“We want to get more of the [chief financial officers], business development, the billing people and operations teams involved in these meetings to help these companies improve,” Henry said.
Members will shape the direction of each meeting through surveys and voting, ensuring that discussions remain relevant to current industry trends. The only constraints are standard antitrust guidelines.
Sparks
“A lot of times we’ll wait a couple months out before the next meeting because, a lot of times, it’s what’s trending at that moment — what’s happening in the marketplace that they’ve got questions that they want answers on,” Sparks said.
Central to the group’s function is NMFTA’s aggregation of operational data. This allows members to share and contrast conditions and trends without revealing company-specific information. Members can access the processed data through a strictly confidential benchmarking dashboard.
“We always want to connect the data to the discussions,” Henry said. “So that investment is both meaningful from a contribution and trust perspective as well as from a time perspective. Because, for some companies, it takes a little bit of time to accumulate the information.”
This collaborative approach addresses a long-standing gap in the LTL space. Henry noted a generational shift toward more open discussions of business challenges and opportunities among executives.
The impact was evident during the inaugural meeting. Sparks recalled a moment that highlighted the power of shared insights.
“One of our groups was talking about how they were looking at their data and what they learned from it,” she said. “You saw three other light bulbs go off right next to me. Each one of them was going, ‘Wait a minute, we’ve got that data, and we didn’t look at it that way.’
“They were sharing a business success, what they were doing, how they came to it with their data, and three other folks were like ‘We didn’t look at it that way.’ ”
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