Your freight, run by people whose whole job is freight.
Not a broker selling you loads one at a time — a standing operations team accountable for your entire transportation budget, quarter after quarter.
Everything runs under your brand, on your numbers: your carriers see your name on the tender, your CFO sees the baseline and the savings ledger — and we defend both at every QBR.
Managed transportation is the outsourcing of a shipper’s transportation department to a third-party logistics provider— the procurement, the daily tendering, the exception management, the freight audit & pay and the KPI reporting that an in-house freight desk would otherwise handle, run instead by a dedicated external team on a transportation management system (TMS). Instead of buying trucks one load at a time from a broker, you hand over the function: an annual procurement calendar that keeps lanes priced at market, a routing guide that gets defended every day, an exception desk that catches the missed pickup before your customer does, and a financial-controls layer that audits every freight invoice down to the accessorial line before a dollar leaves your account.
The shift is from transactional to programmatic. A transactional freight desk reacts: a load appears, somebody calls three brokers, the cheapest truck wins, the invoice gets paid whatever it says. A managed program plans: lanes are bid annually against a documented baseline, carriers are scored on the same on-time and claims metrics every month, accessorial charges are disputed when they’re wrong, and the whole operation reports into a quarterly business review where cost per mile either trends down or somebody explains why. At Qeep, that program runs under your brand and on your numbers — your carriers, your contracts, your GL codes — with our desk doing the work.
3PL vs 4PL vs Control Tower
The three engagement tiers differ in who owns the strategy. As a 3PL, we manage your freight day-to-day — tendering, tracking, exceptions, audit — inside the carrier strategy you keep. As a 4PL, or lead logistics provider, we manage and optimize: carrier-neutral procurement, network design and mode strategy become our accountability, measured against a savings target. A control tower is the lightest tier — your team keeps running the freight while we provide single-pane visibility, predictive ETAs and exception management across every carrier you already use. The comparison below lays out what we run, who owns the carriers and how each tier is priced.
What a managed-transportation program actually does
Four workstreams, running simultaneously. Procurement: annual or semi-annual lane bid events with rate intelligence behind every award, contract negotiation, and a routing guide with primary, backup and surge carriers per lane. Daily operations: tendering to contract carriers per the guide, live track-and-trace, and an exception desk that owns missed pickups, delays and damages from detection to resolution. Financial controls:freight audit & pay — every invoice matched against the contracted rate, accessorials verified or disputed, charges GL-coded to your chart of accounts, one consolidated payment cycle. Strategic reporting:the KPI scorecard (cost per mile, on-time, claims, accessorial recovery, CO₂e per shipment), carrier scorecards, and the quarterly business review where the data turns into decisions.
When does outsourcing your transportation desk pay off?
The economics start working around $1M in annual freight spend — below that, a broker relationship usually suffices; above it, unmanaged freight leaks money in ways no single load reveals. The classic triggers: no in-house transportation team (freight is being run by whoever in operations has ten spare minutes), or a burned-out team doing check calls at 9 p.m.; TMS gaps — no system, an underused one, or five carrier portals pretending to be one; a fragmented carrier base with no lane-level visibility into what anything should cost; and a freight audit that costs more than it recovers— or doesn’t exist, which on most networks means 1–3% of spend quietly leaking through duplicate billings, wrong rates and unverified accessorials. If two or more of those describe your operation, the discovery audit usually pays for the first year of the program by itself.
