What the shock actually exposed
Whether fuel spikes or settles, the headwind was never the real problem. The real problem is how prepared you are to deal with it.
For years, most organizations have treated transportation as a line item, a cost of doing business. It’s easy to see why. Goods have to move, so when something gets rescheduled or needs expediting, teams reach for the fastest option on top of an already-full day: a higher-cost carrier, a spot tender, an expedited mode. The conversation is rarely "what could we consolidate?" or "how do we get ahead of this?" It’s "how do we get it to the customer now?"
That works fine when the water is calm. But when waves hit, organizations realize they need to take more control over transportation costs.
The data you need to weather the disruption lives in disconnected systems that don’t talk to each other, and the habits built on top of that data are reactive by design.
So, how much of the cost around it can you actually control? For most organizations, the answer is considerably more than they do today.
The leak runs in both directions
When fuel spikes, the surcharge climbs on the next invoice almost immediately — carriers update weekly, and you feel it fast. Old Dominion’s published LTL surcharge is sitting near 47% of the linehaul charge right now, up from roughly 26% a year ago.[4] When fuel falls, though, the surcharge is slow to follow. The mechanism that drove your costs up doesn’t reverse on the same schedule, and unless someone is actively reconciling each fuel surcharge against the live market index and your contracted terms, you keep paying the elevated rate long after the underlying cost has dropped.
Which means the easing now underway isn’t relief — it’s the second half of the leak. On the way up, you overpaid quickly. On the way down, you overpay slowly, and far more quietly.
You know where it hurts. The question is why it's so hard to stop.
Fuel is only the most visible leak. The same blind spots run through the rest of the bill — detention, demurrage, and the base freight rates themselves, where invoice errors, miscalculations, and off-contract charges go unchallenged because nobody has the bandwidth to chase them. These aren’t rounding errors: freight billing errors cost mid-market shippers somewhere between 3% and 7% of total freight spend a year, and only about one in twenty purchase-order-to-invoice matches is accurate on the first try.[5]
None of this is a competence problem. Rate formulas are genuinely complicated, accessorial rules vary by carrier and contract, and verifying terms takes real freight expertise. Nobody can investigate every charge on every invoice — so the errors stack up, and the recovery window closes before anyone catches them.
Why the solutions you've already tried fall short
Most organizations have already taken a swing at this, and many found their existing tools and solutions just weren’t built for it.
Business intelligence is usually the first attempt. But traditional BI is built for historical reporting and KPI tracking. It’ll happily confirm what you were billed — but not why, because it can’t easily bring three things into one place: live market conditions, the actual movement of your goods, and the process data that connects them. A dashboard of what already happened isn’t the same as a system that tells you what to do before the billing window closes.
Manual analysis hits different walls: it’s error-prone, slow, and by the time the analysis is done, the data is already stale. That’s because the systems holding this information were never designed to share it. Your TMS knows when something is shipped. Your ERP knows when it got paid and where inventory sits. A planning system knows where goods are headed. Market data knows where fuel is going. None of them talk to each other — so a person ends up being the integration layer, stitching the picture together by hand and reacting only once the margin’s already gone.
Connect the systems, and the picture changes
This is where Celonis comes in — and it’s worth being specific about how, because "we connect your data" is the kind of thing every vendor says.
Celonis connects the systems that have long been disconnected — TMS, ERP, carrier data, and external market signals — into a living digital twin of business operations. This twin provides enterprises the context behind every dollar of transportation cost. Crucially, it runs on the systems you already have. There’s no rip-and-replace, which is precisely why time-to-value gets measured in weeks rather than the multi-year horizon commonly associated with enterprise software.
Used against transportation cost, that connected view has helped enterprises tackle problems like:
- Transportation cost visibility — finding and recovering the invoice charges that exceed planned cost beyond tolerance, across every shipment: intercompany, inbound, and outbound.
- Cost-to-serve — allocating the true transportation cost across customers, lanes, and products, so you can defend margin where it’s actually being made (or lost).
- Intelligent fuel surcharge management — the most urgent one in this market — tracking surcharges against live market indices, flagging charges that drift from your contracted rates, and generating carrier-ready pass-through recommendations before the billing window closes.
- Detention and demurrage prediction — anticipating and heading off the charges that pile up when equipment sits at warehouses, ports, and terminals.
Across all four, the value lands on three levers.
- Spend integrity — you only pay carriers what’s genuinely owed.
- Margin
- Preservation — you understand, and can price for, the true cost of serving every customer.
- Cost Avoidance - prevent avoidable transportation costs before they happen.
The window is open right now
Shocks like this one don't stay loud forever. Oil and diesel prices have already come off their highs, carriers' fuel surcharges are following, and it won't be long before the spreadsheets go back in the drawer and the structural problem goes quietly invisible again — right up until the next disruption arrives to make it visible.
The organizations that come out ahead will be the ones that treat the shock, in both its spike and its fade, as the reason to finally fix the thing underneath it: the inability to see, validate, and act on transportation cost in real time.
Supply chain leaders just like you have achieved dramatic results using the Celonis Platform to gain complete operational visibility and make Enterprise AI work. Watch our step-by-step demo to find out how to transform your supply chain with Celonis, in under ten minutes.
