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How to Leverage ATRI's Operating Costs of Trucking Report

posted by TrueNorth Transportation on Thursday, November 21, 2024

ATRI's Operating Costs of Trucking

Every year since 2008, the American Transportation Research Institute has released their report, An Analysis of the Operating Costs of Trucking. As stated in the report itself, which you can download here, “the annual report has become one of the most trusted resources in the trucking industry for benchmarking costs and operations.” Many companies rely on this data yearly to evaluate their performance. 

Utilize Insights for Your Business

Andrew Mills, VP of Operations at TrueNorth, shares, “At TrueNorth we help our clients with how to manage total cost of risk, and this study ties into that on its counter side of how do you manage operations within your business? Often collaboration of the two is how we help service our clients and manage both sides of their business.” 

At first glance, however, the vast amount of information can be overwhelming, and you may question how any of this applies to your business.  

We have highlighted 4 ways you can utilize this report to inform business decisions within your organization:  

1. Understand How You're Performing Compared to Peers 

It can be difficult to understand how you’re performing compared to your peers; this report helps solve that issue. By seeing averages of competitors in your space, you can determine where they may be more successful than you and you need to improve; or vice versa, what your strengths are.  

2. Evaluate Your Costs

With the benchmarking of various costs such as tire costs, driver wages, repair and maintenance and more, this report can help you evaluate if your spending in different areas is on par with the rest of the industry or if you need to assess your spending and make changes. 

For example, if your average insurance spend is significantly higher than the average – you can take the next steps to evaluate why that is the case, explore other options, and potentially make changes to save money in this area. 

3. Anticipate & Prepare for Future Industry Trends

With this report being released yearly, it can help identify trends in the industry. Throughout the report, they analyze the trends of data and offer insights into what this means identifying the section as “Looking Ahead."

4. Submit Your Data for a Customized Report

For the motor carriers or owner-operators that provide their data, ATRI provides a customized report for their use. This is particularly helpful for those that don’t have dedicated analytics resources and allows you to see your data directly compared to competitors.  

A Deeper Dive

For a deeper dive into 2024’s report, why this information matters, and how it helps the industry check out this episode of the TN Truck Thought podcast featuring Alex Leslie, Senior Research Associate at ATRI, and Andrew Mills, member of the ATRI Research Advisory Committee and TrueNorth VP of Operations.