Why the Logistics Industry Is Broken—and What a Better Model Looks Like

The VP of Operations at a fast-growing CPG brand opens her inbox to a message from her largest retail customer:

“Following up—we haven’t received the shipment. Do you have an update?”

She doesn’t.

It was a $100,000 order. A high-visibility rollout tied to a major campaign. And the first she’s hearing of a problem is from the customer.

She emails her 3PL. No answer. She calls. The rep says they’ll “check with the carrier.” Two hours pass. Then four. No update. No plan. Just silence.

It’s not the first time. The same playbook repeats every time something goes sideways: long email threads, vague explanations, and a growing sense that no one’s actually accountable.

They’ve outgrown this partnership—but more than that, they’ve outgrown the entire model.

What used to work when shipments were simpler and stakes were lower now breaks under pressure. There’s no real-time visibility. No proactive communication. Just layers of intermediaries between the company and the people actually moving their freight.

And that’s the real problem.

Most traditional 3PLs sell simplicity: one partner to manage all your transportation needs. But beneath the pitch is a sales-first, service-second model.

Account executives are incentivized to close deals—not ensure execution. Once the first shipment is tendered, freight gets handed off to a separate team who hands it off again to a carrier. The original relationship quickly dissolves into a string of transactional touchpoints.

There’s rarely a contract locking in commitment. And that’s the truth: it’s not a partnership. It’s a series of transactions, and when things go wrong, there’s little continuity, no accountability, and no recovery plan.

When a shipment misses delivery and a chargeback is looming, shippers often find themselves stuck in a loop of follow-ups:

• "We’re still waiting to hear back from dispatch."
• "The carrier said they had truck issues."
• "We didn’t realize it needed a liftgate—was that in the notes?"

And the worst part? Shippers have no way to verify the explanations they’re given. There’s no real transparency into the root cause of the issue—only the 3PL’s version of events.

Even when patterns of failure start to emerge, most 3PLsdon’t measure service-level-agreement (SLA) compliance in a way that leads to systemic improvement. There’s no structured post-mortem. Just another apology. Another promise to do better next time.

These aren't one-off mistakes. They’re symptoms of a model where no one owns the outcome.

This is why so many shippers wind up doing the very work they hired someone else to handle.

‍

Here’s the typical chain of communication:

• Shipper tells the 3PL what they need
• 3PL tells the carrier's dispatcher
• Dispatcher tells the driver (who might be an independent contractor)

That’s at least three layers between your freight and the person physically moving it. And in each layer, things can get lost in translation—or worse, deprioritized.

Picture this: a shipper requests a 10 AM delivery window because the receiving dock closes at noon. But instead of scheduling the appointment themselves, they rely on their 3PL—who in turn relies on the carrier. The carrier’s dispatcher chooses the time that best suits their own network, not the shipper’s needs. The driver shows up at 2 PM. The dock is closed. The freight can’t be unloaded, and now the shipper looks unreliable to their customer.

In effect, the shipper has turned over their customer service to the trucking company—without even realizing it.

This is the chain of confusion. Every added layer makes it harder to ensure the right information gets to the right person at the right time. Like a game of telephone, what starts as a clear directive ends in a missed delivery and finger-pointing.

This model isn’t designed for accountability. It’s designed for scalability—at your expense.

Many 3PLs still operate on systems built for yesterday’s logistics. Outdated TMS platforms. Siloed tools that don’t integrate. Customer portals that show a status—“In Transit”—but no real information. Dispatch systems run from spreadsheets and inboxes.

Behind the scenes, logistics professionals are doing hero work just to keep things from falling apart:

• Copying and pasting load data across systems
• Manually emailing for updates on ETAs
• Reconciling shipment status in one system with billing codes in another
• Chasing PODs at the end of the week just to close the books

You’ve got ops managers spending their Friday afternoons combing through three disconnected platforms trying to figure out which loads delivered and which still haven’t updated since Tuesday. You’ve got shippers calling dispatchers—not because they want to, but because the portal hasn’t refreshed in 12 hours and the customer is demanding answers.

This is the human cost of manual workarounds. Strategic minds bogged down by busywork just to compensate for bad systems.

And the contrast is infuriating: your customer can track a$12 sandwich in real time. But you have to call someone just to find out where a $100,000 shipment is.

This isn’t logistics innovation. It’s a system duct-taped together with inboxes, PDFs, and guesswork.

‍

The traditional freight model is riddled with misaligned incentives:

• 3PLs want to win the business, even if they can’t cover it all
• Carriers want the highest-paying load, not necessarily the best-fit
• Shippers want consistency and communication—but they’re at the bottom of the priority list

When no one owns the full experience, no one is truly accountable.

Here’s how that plays out in a common, real-world scenario:

You have a routine lane—say, Chicago to Dallas. Your 3PLgives you a rate based on market benchmarks and finds a reliable carrier. Things run smoothly. The carrier learns your operation. Your team trusts them. You think you’ve found a stable solution.

Then a new carrier comes along offering a lower rate. Maybe they had a customer drop off, or they have seasonal capacity to fill. The 3PLswitches your freight to the cheaper option—not to save you money, but to increase their margin. Your rate stays the same, but their profit grows. You never hear about the change.

But a few months later, that lower-priced carrier finds better-paying freight and stops covering your loads. The 3PL goes back to the original carrier—but now they’ve filled their trucks. Worse, they know the relationship isn’t sticky. They decline to return.

And now you’ve got a major product rollout, and your 3PL is scrambling. They’re calling around to unfamiliar carriers who don’t know your docks, don’t know your receivers, and—sensing desperation—quote accordingly.

Now the 3PL is back at your door asking for a price increase. The new carriers are charging more, and the margin’s too thin. You thought you were paying for consistency. But what you really got was short-term arbitrage dressed up as service.

The result? You’re paying for coordination, not execution.

‍

Growth is supposed to make things easier. More volume means more leverage, more consistency, more predictability.

But in freight, growth often reveals the cracks that were already there.

When you were moving five loads a week, the system worked—mostly. A missed delivery here or there was annoying, but manageable. You could follow up manually. Patch holes. Absorb the noise.

But now you're moving 50, 100, 200 loads a week. There’s no room for improvisation. You need reliability at scale. You need partners who can anticipate issues, not react to them. And most traditional 3PLs aren’t built for that.

So when your big product rollout hits and your 3PL is scrambling to find carriers—because they burned the stable ones chasing margin—it’s not just your ops team that feels it.

It’s your customer.

They’re the ones wondering where the shipment is. They’re the ones updating launch calendars, reworking promos, pushing back meetings. You spent months building a plan—and one disconnected delivery breaks the chain. Just like it did with that $100,000 shipment, when the first sign of trouble came not from your 3PL, but from your customer.

At scale, logistics isn’t just about moving freight—it’s about protecting the trust your brand has earned.

And when your 3PL can’t keep up, they’re not just costing you money. They’re costing you momentum.

‍

What if you didn’t need a go-between? What if you could connect directly with the people moving your freight—but with the systems, service, and strategy that traditional 3PLs lack?

That’s the idea behind Direct Party Logistics (DPL)—a model built to eliminate the confusion and misalignment that plague the legacy model, while giving shippers the tools and control typically reserved for the largest companies.

Novari’s DPL approach combines:

• A tech base layer to automate execution and surface real-time visibility
• Skilled operations teams for exception management and proactive communication
• Direct relationships with service providers, reducing layers and improving accountability

It’s a model designed not just for the Fortune 500—but for growing companies that can’t afford inefficiency, don’t have time to chase down shipments, and may not have the internal bandwidth or leverage to manage freight like a billion-dollar brand.

We start by tailoring workflows and procedures that fit your operation—your freight, your service standards, your way of working. You gain full visibility through a control tower that highlights exceptions and trends, not just shipments. And instead of chasing carriers or apologizing to customers, you get a logistics partner who flags issues before they become problems.

No opaque markups. No scrambling for coverage. No long email threads.

Just a better way to move freight—with execution quality and transparency that more than justify what most shippers already pay in buried3PL margin, let alone the cost of avoidable mistakes.

It’s not just a better system. It’s a different mindset.

‍

You’re not just buying a truck.

You’re buying trust. Visibility. Execution. Confidence.

That’s what your customer expected when they placed a$100,000 order. That’s what you expected from your 3PL. And that’s what you didn’t get.

You shouldn’t be hearing about missed shipments from your customer. You shouldn’t be chasing updates or hoping your 3PL got it right. And you shouldn’t be paying for someone else’s margin strategy that leaves you scrambling when it matters most.

The old model is familiar—but it’s not serving you. It breaks under pressure. It scales in the wrong direction. And the longer you try to make it work, the more you risk: wasted time, eroded trust, lost momentum.

It doesn’t have to be that way.

If any of this sounds familiar, now’s the time to take a closer look at how your freight is managed—and what it could look like with the right partner in place.

Because you don’t just need a logistics provider.

You need one that’s aligned with your goals. Built for your growth. And committed to getting it right when it matters most.

‍