Every year, ATRI telegraphs what it believes are the major research issues. For 2025, ATRI is intent on studying:

Rising Insurance Costs and Self Insurance Motivations. Building on prior years of study, this will look at current commercial auto insurance trends and investigate the growing role of insurance captives and self-insurance retentions.

Efficacy of Entry-Level Driver Training on Safety Outcomes. Prior research examined driver training programs and safety outcomes. This year’s research will use that safety data and statistical models to determine the safety impacts of the mandated Entry-Level Driver Training approach.

Safety Impacts of In-Cab Monitoring. This year’s research will examine the technology data to determine any statistics that connect in-cab monitoring with improved safety outcomes, along with particular strategies that serve to improve those safety outcomes.

Capitalizing on Telematics Data. Not all carriers have a full slate of telematics data designed to improve their operations. Research this year aims to collect essential data tools and applications for the spectrum of carrier operations toward improving performance.

Understanding the Prevalence and Impact of Cabotage Violations. “Cabotage violations occur when non-domiciled carriers engage in multiple point-to-point deliveries within the U.S. These cabotage violations can result in unfair competition by undercutting pricing and taking jobs away from U.S.-based trucking companies. This research will seek to quantify the frequency, scale and impact of these cabotage violations.”

The one element linking those 2025 research topics? Safety. The insurance. The training. The monitoring. The metrics. Even the cabotage protections are designed to secure the safety of domestic operations.

We’re encouraged by and appreciate the focus.

The post Trucking and Research and Safety appeared first on NATCO Transport.

JFK is the busiest international commercial airport in North America and the sixth busiest airport in the nation. Combine that with the Tri-State area, which has the world’s largest metropolitan economy, the largest metropolitan urban landmass (4,669 square miles), and a population of some 20 million people.

Those numbers also reflect the traffic. The human movement, the vehicle movement. And the cargo. From edible nuts to mechanical bolts, from produce to wood pulp, from garments to electronics, from most anything to everything: the cargo scenario at JFK is enormous. And growing.

JFK’s Air Cargo Center has a number of entities operating within this ecosystem, including:

• 70,000 square feet of cargo warehouse space for Air France-KLM.

• The ARK at JFK, an animal handling facility includes veterinary services, a kennel, and handling of equine, bovine, swine, birds and exotic & zoo animals.

• A 260,000 square-foot cargo building for Worldwide Flights Services.

• 175,000 square feet for American Airlines cargo terminal

• 225,000 square feet facility for Prologis Cargo Center, which includes operations for U.S. Customs & Border Protection.

• 90,000 square-foot building for DHL Global Forwarding.

• 81,000 square feet for China Airlines Cargo.

• 220,000 square-foot cargo facility for Korean Air.

Add to that now a new consolidated cargo handling center. At 350,000 square feet, it will contribute to the support of 93,000 jobs and $11 billion in annual economic activity to JFK’s air cargo universe, which processed more than 1.6 million tons of cargo last year and is, among many other things, the country’s busiest eCommerce center.

The Tri-State region gives commercial trucking easy access to the I-95 corridor, Maine to Florida. Cargo arriving here, departing from here, and passing through here is best served by efficiency (yeah, and price). And a state-of-the-art cargo center helps to best serve that.

The post Central Intelligence (Cargo Version) appeared first on NATCO Transport.

3PLs: Above the Fog

Thomas, an industrial sourcing platform, has produced a small eBook they’ve titled “Selling Resilience: Attracting Manufacturing Buyers.” While the wording is relatively brief, with a couple of focus areas geared to draw in Thomas business (no harm, no foul), we’re especially impressed with a particular section.

“How to Showcase Your Resilience” is the first of the eBook’s two main areas. Resilience to what? Well, everything. The post-pandemic landscape, which has been influenced by supply chain disruption. The tenuous nature of actual and possible tariffs on pricing and availability. It’s always something, and American industries have had experience with such things for only some 249 years now.

Thomas describes three approaches to showcasing resilience:

Reliability. They write: “Start by showcasing a solid track record. When talking to potential customers, highlight your reputation for on-time delivery and explain how domestic sourcing can expedite shipping time and reduce lead time variability.” This also includes transparency. “Be honest,” they write, “and upfront about lead times, pricing, and potential challenges.” They results? Reinforcing partnerships and building “confidence in your ability to deliver.”

Team NATCO has embraced this approach since we began operations more than three decades ago. Here’s the foundation of The NATCO Way:

• Experienced Logistics Planning
• Prompt Communication
• Thorough Determination of Your Needs
• Quick Turnaround on Estimates
• Reliable, Competitive Pricing
• Professional…with a Human Touch

Flexibility. The Thomas take: “Providing clients with real-time visibility into the supply chain and utilizing advanced analytics and agile processes promotes operational and supply flexibility.”

Well, yes. Adaptability is essential to the transportation industry, especially as we’re facing ever-uncertain situations. If you take disruption as a given, it helps minimize the surprise. That disruption happens all the time, from the domino effect of a simple traffic jam on I-95 to a bridge closure that requires alternate routes to get the disaster recovery shipment to its destination.

Value. Thomas writes: “What’s the No. 1 thing buyers want in a supplier? A long-term partnership.”

You might be surprised that price doesn’t top that list of things. While we’re highly competitive on rates, we wholeheartedly agree that establishing and maintaining trust is the dominant factor when companies consider different 3PLs.

90% of our customers are repeat business. We know that exceptional customer service and proactive strategy bring you back to us, time & again.

The post 3PL Foundations appeared first on NATCO Transport.

We’re Glad They’re Nationwide

24/7/365

We’re grateful to our truck drivers. Whether they network with NATCO or they’ve never heard of us, we appreciate the work they do.

Quite simply: our nation’s truck drivers drive the nation’s economy.

We’re happy to share all that. And it’s entirely fitting to have a National Truck Driving Appreciation Week, which has been celebrating our carriers this past week.

Social media is filled with shout-outs ⏤ individual appreciations and collective hurrahs alike ⏤ for this extraordinary workforce, especially this week.

As American Trucking Associations puts it:

“Nearly every aspect of daily life is made possible because a truck driver delivered the goods and resources people need.

“NTDAW is an important time for America to thank all the professional truck drivers for their hard work and commitment in undertaking one of our economy’s most demanding and important jobs. These 3.5 million professional men and women not only deliver our goods safely, securely, and on time, but they also keep our highways safe.”

G’head, check out #NTDAW24 on your favorite social media platform.

Some stats to back up the impact drivers have:

• American truckers driver more than 330 billion miles each yar

• Truck drivers deliver about 11 billion tons of freight each year.

• Trucks deliver some 70% of all freight moved in the United States.

• More than 80% of communities depend solely on trucks to receive their goods.

• There are some 8.5 million jobs directly related to the trucking industry.

They’re there in good times and bad. They’re the firefighters of the road: when bad things like natural disasters happen, truck drivers drive toward the danger.

Or, as Yogi Berra said, “When you see a fork in the road, take it.”

The post In Appreciation: Truck Driver Edition appeared first on NATCO Transport.

NATCO on Countering Cargo Theft

As we near the end of our “Swiped Stuff” series, including retail theft and cargo theft, keep in mind (and it boggles the mind) that up to $30 billion in cargo is stolen each year.

The goal would seem to develop a cohesive and comprehensive approach to dealing with it: countering and combatting and minimizing product loss.

Easier said than done. There’s no real national standard for fighting theft. (Even the insurance companies have various categories of theft.)

Truck security is different; for example, reefers are not like flatbeds. Key and lock systems ⏤ from key to fob to phone app ⏤ vary among brands and companies. CCTV monitoring is in place at key hot points, or it’s not.

One way to reduce such loss is to get a good idea of what exactly is being stolen, in what quantities, and in what arenas (i.e., parking lot, truck stop, warehouse, impersonator).

The American Transportation Research Institute just put out a call for “motor carriers and brokers to participate in a new data collection initiative.”

It’s a survey that provides a way for the target groups to share their information anonymously.

The anonymous angle is key.

First, it protects identities. Who wants to publicly fess up that they’re getting robbed of so much stuff, and so often? Will potential and existing customers have second thoughts about doing business if any given company has what might be perceived as reputation management issues?

Second, it protects the details of any weaknesses, perceived and actual, of companies. If the XYZ company says, “Yes, we know there is a security lapse at the bay doors,” we can be confident the bad guys are going to target those bay doors at their earliest convenience.

You can find the survey for motor carriers and brokers HERE.

The post The Swiped Stuff, Part IV appeared first on NATCO Transport.

See More Cargo, Hear More Cargo…

We’ve been exploring retail theft and cargo theft. The bad guys are all-too clever, which has caused retail outlets ⏤ from mom-and-pop shops to big box stores ⏤ to put swaths of merchandise under lock and key.

Theft from warehouses and commercial vehicles seems at first a very different scenario. Bay doors of the warehouse are necessarily porous: the cargo’s gotta get in and get out. Because there are people waiting: receivers, refiners, other carriers, outlets, end users.

Travelers, the insurance company, lists five types of cargo theft:

1. Straight Cargo Theft. Thieves target areas such as truck stops and parking lots.

2. Strategic Cargo Theft. A more sophisticated approach, where the bad guys produce bogus paperwork, identity theft, fictitious pick-ups, or combinations of these to create confusion and get away with the goods.

3. Technology. Thieves use “sniffers” that find covert GPS signals, then jam the signals to make for a cleaner theft that’s much less likely to be tracked.

4. Cyber. That seemingly innocent, safe email with a link that you click? There’s a trojan horse in there, malware that lets the bad guys into your company’s database for their manipulation of loads.

5. Pilferage. Maybe the most curious entry in the list, this is the seemingly small thefts along, say, a route with multiple stops. Those small swipes add up.

With each of these categories, Travelers recommends awareness of actual and virtual surroundings. That might seem simple, and maybe even simplistic. Yet, it’s often the simple things that allow for greater protection and greater chance of a non-eventful delivery of freight from Point A to Point B.

Double-checking the lock on the back of the truck. Double-checking that you locked the cab. Confirming the GPS locator is active and pinging the right dispatch coordinator. Doing your best to confirm your contact person as legitimate.

Sometimes it’s out of our control. Sometimes it’s preventable. So much of theft prevention relies on communication and trust.

The post The Swiped Stuff, Part III appeared first on NATCO Transport.

Keep on Truck Stealin’?

Theft of our consumer goods has skyrocketed. From baby formula and electronics to crayons and instant coffee, retail stores are putting high-demand merchandise and everyday items alike under lock and key in the store aisles.

And before that merchandise even reaches the aisles…well, sometimes they don’t even reach the store.

That’s because the level of cargo theft is high. From our friends at Transport Topics:

“CargoNet” ⏤ an organization focused on theft prevention and recovery ⏤ “reported that criminal activities impacting the logistics and transportation industry increased 46% year-over-year to 925 incidents and 10% from the fourth quarter of 2023. The report estimates that $154.6 million worth of goods was stolen during that period.”

Sometimes it’s outright theft: from a dock, from the back of the truck. Warehouses can be notoriously busy environments; it’s easy to literally get lost in the shuffle. Now there’s a new wrinkle to things: document forgery.

Picture the bad guy posing as a commercial truck driver. He picks up a load and drives it to the destination. He begins unloading. So far, so good. It’s just like any legitimate load, yes? No: he’s unloaded only a bit of the inventory. He’s altered, fudged, and otherwise forged the bill of lading. For all appearances, everybody assumes everything is good. But it’s too late. The thief is gone.

It’s a nightmarish version of the snarky comment: “Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way when you criticize them, you are a mile away from them and you still have their shoes.”

States with the largest spikes in these thefts: California, Illinois, and Texas.

Most swiped inventory: small appliances, booze, energy drinks, and copper.

What does this mean for the industry? Think insurance rates, security expenses, trust, communication. More on that next time.

The post The Swiped Stuff, Part II appeared first on NATCO Transport.

Another busy day at the store.

We’ve seen it in the movies: the guy with the garage filled with boxes of toasters, microwaves, and televisions; racks of fur coats and suits; gaggles of granola bars and energy drinks.

Is he stockpiling for the day after an alien invasion? Starting an Etsy shop?

Nope. Chances are that he either stole it (the “thief”) or received the merchandise (an “accessory after the fact”). What he does with all that stuff has fueled…a thousand movies.

Over here on the “real” side of the silver screen, retail and wholesale theft has been at epidemic levels. Some of that generates from shoplifting: swiping the pack of gum, the earrings, the brisket stuffed into spacious jogging pants.

Retailers have taken to locking up inventory. Rows of deodorant, shampoo, toothpaste, cosmetics, backpacks, over-the-counter medicines: under lock and key, requiring us to find an employee to open up a particular case or shelf in order for us to get a single tube of Old Spice into our shopping cart.

On TikTok, one man ranted about CVS treating a bag of candy like a controlled substance. A comment on Reddit referred to our new “inconvenience store.”

So, it’s the inconvenience of the barricaded shopping experience versus the loss of revenue from sometimes rampant theft. The industry has a term for it: “shrink.” Yep, that’s what inventory and revenue do when things get swiped.

Theft is not at all a new phenomenon. As Marisa Gerber writes in the L.A. Times, “Shoplifting is as old as shopping itself.” Yet statistics and the prominence of those barricades in the retail stores give us strong hints at how much of a problem this has become.

The trucking angle here? Go back to the guy with his garage filled with all that merchandise. He skipped the middle man. No retail store visits for him. He stole straight from the sources, either the truck or the warehouse.

How he did that is a fascinating and vexing thing. And that’s where we pick up next time.

The post The Swiped Stuff appeared first on NATCO Transport.

Our series on The NATCO Way of doing business.

The Delay This Time

We have no problem with sharing one of the key ingredients to the secret sauce of our success.

In fact, we’re proud to share this ingredient. We’re making it available to to our competition as open source code. Here it is:

Clear and timely communication.

There you go, competitors. Have at it.

We bring up communication a lot on our blog, and we weave the importance of it throughout our website.

Clear and timely communication is so central that it’s the theme of our inaugural monthly newsletter, Ideas in Transit. Each month, we’ll explore issues affecting the transportation industry, how we approach them, and how that contributes to The NATCO Difference.

Communication with you should not be puzzling.

This month, it’s all about communicating. There are a number of reasons why deliveries are delayed. Some of them are truly unanticipated ⏤ a sudden flash flood, for example, that causes a driver to detour, or maybe the vehicle breaks down.

Most delays, however, are caused by a communication problem. Somebody forgot to confirm the order for the pilot cars on that oversize load. Somebody forgot to confirm with the wrecker service for the offload. Somebody forgot to secure a DOT heavy load permit. The list goes on.

The NATCO Difference is in our approach. Delivering updates to our customers in a timely, honest manner. At the beginning and at the end of the day: exceptional, clear communication ⏤ with you, with dispatch, and with our drivers ⏤ helps your load transport on time, on budget, and in compliance.

We offer a free freight assessment. Click HERE to see how NATCO can help save you time and save you money on your freight costs.

Click HERE to read our Ideas in Transit newsletter.

The post The NATCO Differential, Part III appeared first on NATCO Transport.

NATCO: At the Ready

Without further ado, we give you a sampling of the essential Frequently Asked Questions Team NATCO receives from our potential customers. (See HERE for our full Q&A.)

Do you have available carriers in my region?
Most probably yes: We have more than 9,000 carriers who have previously worked with NATCO. We are continuously prescreening and adding carriers to our network, adding some 75 new carriers per month.

How much do you charge?
Every quoted load is based on your requirements and specifics. This depends on reviewing those specs and requirements for the order; we determine your priorities and proceed from there.

How much time do you need?
We can turn around basic quotes in about 30 minutes. If you have particular, specific requirements, most often we’ll still produce a quote by EOD.

Where are you located?
NATCO’s headquarters are in Arlington, Texas; with today’s technology, our reach is truly national in scope.

What kinds of equipment and services can you provide?
NATCO’s capabilities are extensive and include:

• Overdimensional & Overweight

• Flatbeds

• Dry Vans

• Reefers

• Local

• High Value Commodities

• Specialized

• Expedited

• Team Drivers

• Produce/perishables

• Hazmat

• Mexico/Canada

How quickly can I initiate a delivery?
Depending on the market statistics, average coverage is most often located within 2-3 hours for a standard legal move and we can typically initiate within 24-48 hours. That said, we specialize in rush orders. Contact us at (800) 846-2826, and we’ll readily work with you.

The NATCO Difference: We proactively assess market statistics to evaluate availability. This allows us to tap the pulse of trends and provide shorter lead times.

How do I pay?
We have various options, including credit cards and a credit application packet to establish credit with us.

What are your certifications?
Cori Eckley, NATCO’s vice president of operations, is a Certified Transportation Broker, the highest broker certification and the most widely recognized distinction in the transportation industry.

NATCO is a proud member of the TIA: Transportation Intermediaries Association — the gold standard of 3rd-party logistics groups.

What if I need to reach you at off hours?
The NATCO team is on call 24/7. Messages are forwarded from voicemail to email. We ALWAYS have access to and respond to your communications.

The post Essential Q & A appeared first on NATCO Transport.