Signs Your Routing Guide Is Falling Apart
Six signals of routing guide decay, in the order they appear and readable in data you already have, plus four variables carriers price that shippers miss.
Routing guides fail slowly, then all at once
Nobody discovers a broken routing guide on the day it breaks. They discover it the week spot rates cross contract on a lane that used to cover at primary, and by then the degradation has been running for a quarter.
The useful thing about that lag is that it is measurable. Every signal below sits in data you already have, and none of them requires a market subscription to read.
Six signals, in the order they appear
Primary tender acceptance is drifting down, not falling.
A carrier who accepted 95% of your tenders last quarter and accepts 88% this quarter has not exited your lane. They have started choosing which of your loads to take, which means your freight has become the marginal option in their network, not the base. That drift is the earliest signal and the one most often filed as noise.
Acceptance is holding but the accept is getting later.
Time-to-accept is a better instrument than acceptance rate because it moves first. A carrier deciding at hour six instead of hour one is shopping your load against alternatives before committing. Same acceptance number, different relationship.
Rejections are clustering by day of week.
Random rejection is capacity noise. Rejection concentrated on Thursday and Friday pickups means your loads are losing to something specific, usually a shipper whose freight positions the truck better for the weekend reset. That is a lane-design problem, not a rate problem, and paying more will not fix it.
You are going deeper into the routing guide on the same lanes.
Track the average tender position that covers, not just whether it covered. Moving from primary to second on a lane, consistently, is the guide telling you the primary rate is no longer market before any index does.
Backup carriers are becoming primary in practice.
If the carrier you designated third is covering more of a lane than the one you designated first, the guide on paper no longer describes the guide in operation. Every subsequent rate conversation is then being had against the wrong baseline.
Your own accessorial spend is rising on unchanged freight.
Detention, TONU and layover creeping up on lanes whose physical characteristics have not changed usually means carriers are accepting the load and then absorbing a worse experience than they priced. That is a relationship running down, and it precedes an exit.
What none of these tell you
They do not tell you whether your rate is right, because they cannot. Tender behavior is a signal about your freight's position in a carrier's network, and position is a function of the rate, the lane, the appointment rules, the dwell and the reload opportunity together. A guide can degrade with the rate untouched because a receiver started running two hours behind.
That is why the fix for a degrading guide is often not a rate change. It is finding out which of the other four variables moved.
Reading it against your own operation
Before repricing anything, check the three things a carrier prices that most shippers do not track.
The question a carrier is asking
How long is my truck sitting, and is it predictable enough to plan the next load around?
If I am ninety minutes late, do I lose the door or do I get worked in?
Where does this leave me, and is there freight there, or am I deadheading out?
Is my exposure capped, and does the cap get honoured without an argument?
The 48-hour move
If the signals are clear and you need coverage before you can run a proper bid, a mini-bid on the affected lanes is the instrument. It is not a compressed annual bid and running it like one is how it fails.
We wrote that up separately, because it is a different job with different mechanics.