Freight Risk Stress Tester S5

Dedicated / contract / spot mix · Shock scenarios · Tender rejection cascade · Resilience curve

A budget is a forecast of the normal year. This is the abnormal one. Dedicated capacity costs more when nothing goes wrong and less when everything does. The question is not "what is the cheapest mix" but "how much am I willing to pay to cap the downside". Illustrative sample data.

Annual freight demand

Loads per year8,262

Avg length of haul525 mi

Peak-season concentration1.15×

Peak-month volume relative to the average month. Drives how much capacity must be reserved for a few weeks a year.

Rates by procurement channel

Contract (routing guide)$2.52 /mi

Dedicated fleet$2.77 /mi

Typically a premium over contract in a soft market — that premium is the insurance policy.

Spot market$2.90 /mi

Fuel surcharge$0.59 /mi

Dedicated overhead (per truck / yr)$22k

Management, telematics and administration on top of the per-mile rate.

Minimum commitment85%

The fleet is sized for the peak month but billed at this share of committed miles all year. The gap between billed and actual miles is the cost of the insurance.

Dedicated utilisation ceiling88%

Service reliability

Contract tender acceptance92%

Rejected tenders fall through to spot at whatever the market is charging that day. This is the single most underestimated cost line in freight budgets.

Contracted capacity65%

Share of demand carriers have actually committed to in the routing guide.

Acceptance decay beyond capacity1.20 pp / pp

Every point of tender above contracted capacity costs this much acceptance. Set to 0 to see the naive assumption that a guide absorbs unlimited volume.

Service failure penalty$260 /load

Expediting, chargebacks and recovery cost when no capacity can be found at all.

Spot capacity availability97%

Capacity mix

Dedicated share20%

Contract share65%

Spot is the residual. Dedicated + contract cannot exceed 100% — the sliders clamp automatically.

Optimal mix search

Objective

The mix that is cheapest on average is almost never the mix that survives a bad year. Choosing the objective is the risk-appetite decision.

Mix comparison

Ded	Con	Spot	Base	Mean	P90	Range

Range = P90 − P10. The narrower it is, the more predictable the budget.

Stressed annual freight cost

Cost build-up

Scenario ladder

Scenario	Cost	vs base	Spot exposure	Unserved

Resilience curve — cost vs dedicated share

Monte Carlo distribution

Scenario ladder

Where the money goes