Transportation companies, shippers and carriers can reduce fuel costs, carbon emissions and improve customer service by creating Vested Transportation agreements. So says "Unpacking Transportation Pricing: A White Paper Challenging Transportation Pricing Models." The study addresses the transportation industry's struggle to move away from an outdated business model and pricing for transportation services to relevancy through what the authors coin as Vested Transportation collaborations.

The white paper, available free with registration at: http://www.vestedoutsourcing.com/resources/whitepapers/ , is co-published by the University of Tennessee's Center for Executive Education (CEE), Transolve and Supply Chain Visions. It's part of the center's Unpacking series, which helps to distill or "unpack" thought leadership on various topics. In the paper, authors Peter D. Moore, Hank Mullen, Lynnette Guess, and Allen Van Boven challenge conventional thinking on how companies approach transportation commerce.

"Vested Transportation Pricing espouses transparency and fairness and is designed to solve today's real supply chain transportation problems -  how to optimize overall transportation and reduce fuel consumption, producing the very tangible benefit of reducing carbon emissions from the transportation process," said Moore, the white paper's lead author.

The principles are based on the Vested Outsourcing work at the University of Tennessee being led by Kate Vitasek, Karl Manrodt and Mike Ledyard.

Vitasek, University of Tennessee's CEE faculty member and author of Vested Outsourcing: Five Rules That Will Transform Outsourcing, said, "Through the break-through approach of Vested Transportation, this white paper lays a road map for companies to apply Vested Outsourcing rules to the unique business needs of the transportation industry. The authors provide examples of how applying these concepts creates substantial improvements in the area of transportation commerce with real benefits in terms of pricing for the shipper and cost-reduction for the carrier."

Unpacking Transportation Pricing covers the following five main sections in which the authors discuss and provide concrete advice for understanding the current climate of the transportation industry and incorporating Vested Transportation principles:

1.    Illustrating how the industry is at a potential tipping point.
2.    Explaining the dogma associated with the most widely used less-than-truckload pricing methodology: class-rate pricing.
3.    Demonstrating how old-school class-rate pricing is flawed.
4.    Introducing the concept of Vested Outsourcing: a break-through approach the authors believe will transform how companies approach transportation commerce.
5.    Introducing the concept of Vested Transportation, providing a road map for companies to apply Vested Outsourcing rules to the unique business needs of the transportation industry. 

Source: University of Tennessee