Most shippers run transportation as a stack of disconnected vendors — a 3PL, a customs broker, a freight forwarder, a domestic broker, a parcel carrier, a TMS — each with its own scorecard, none with full accountability. RK Managed Transportation collapses that stack into one operating partner with one quality system, one platform of record, and one team that picks up the phone when a line goes down at 2am.
Each line is delivered under one operating standard, one SOP library, and one platform of record — the same discipline that defines every RK service. Buy one. Buy the stack. Either way, the data lives in the same place.
Domestic over-the-road, intermodal, and specialty capacity sourced from a vetted carrier network — active dispatch oversight, daily lane management, escalation protocols. Capacity that fails is replaced before the shipper notices.
Strategic lane engineering — not just spot quoting. We model origin-destination pairs against your manufacturing rhythm, identify consolidation and pool-point opportunities, and design the network you should have, not the one that grew accidentally.
Annual carrier RFPs run by a dedicated procurement team — structured bid events, qualified-carrier vetting, contract negotiation, and award optimization. The output is a routing guide your team can stand behind, not a spreadsheet that ages out in 90 days.
Pre- and post-audit of every freight invoice against the rated routing guide — accessorial validation, duplicate detection, weekly settlement, and a single 1099-style monthly statement for your AP team. Recoveries returned to your P&L, not buried in carrier credits.
A live operational picture across every mode and every lane — tendering, dispatch, in-transit, delivery, exception. Same screen the dispatch team uses. Same data the carrier sees. Exception alerts pushed before the shipper has to ask.
Where transportation matters most is the seam between modes — ocean-to-warehouse, warehouse-to-line, line-to-customer. RK Managed Transportation lives inside the same operating company that runs your 3PL, your forwarding, your specialty pharmacy. No handoff. No phone tree. One owner.
DOT enforcement, ELD strictness, owner-operator exits, and CDL pipeline constraints are removing carriers from the road permanently. Dry van forecasts have been revised up materially for the second half of the year. Spot exposure is no longer the cheap option — it’s the volatile one. RFP-locked capacity with a managed broker is the conservative play.
Enterprise procurement teams are collapsing logistics-vendor counts — from twelve point solutions to three integrated providers. The provider that owns warehousing, forwarding, brokerage, and visibility under one MSA wins the consolidation play. The pure-play broker becomes a line item under it.
Project44-class real-time visibility is no longer differentiation — it’s table stakes in every enterprise RFP. RK delivers it bundled inside Managed Transportation on CargoWise rather than as an add-on subscription. One platform, one bill, one data model.
Agentic dispatch, auto-tender, and AI-driven exception management are collapsing the cost-to-execute on each load. RK is building those tools inside our own operating discipline — not buying them as an add-on. The savings flow to the customer, not to a vendor’s margin line.
We work with the supply-chain teams at semiconductor capital equipment makers, EV and battery manufacturers, life-sciences innovators, data-center builders, and the broader high-technology base — bringing one integrated transportation operation to a customer base that has historically had to assemble it themselves.
FAB-grade specialty FTL, hazmat-certified parts moves, white-glove tool transport, and inbound coordination across Asia — managed inside the same CargoWise platform that already runs your warehousing and customs.
Class-9 lithium hazmat capacity, cross-state cell flows, plant inbound and finished-vehicle outbound managed as one program. Lane design tuned to the gigafactory cadence.
Validated cold-chain transportation, DSCSA-aware execution, clinical-trial supply lanes, and patient-direct dispensing — the brokered capacity layer of an end-to-end GxP operation, not a generic broker.
Heavy-haul, flatbed steel, transformers, switchgear, white-glove GPU and server transport — sequenced against the campus construction critical path. Brokerage on the front end, near-site staging on the back end.
Pure-play brokers compete on price, technology, and people. We compete on something they don’t have — an asset-based operating company behind every brokered load. Five structural advantages that survive a market cycle.
When a brokered load gets stuck, we pivot it into one of our 16 warehouses and re-dispatch from inside our own four walls. Pure-play brokers have to broker the broker.
Tri-state LTL backed by our asset-based fleet at OnTime Trucking — not rented capacity from Saia, TForce, or Roadrunner. Service guarantees we can stand behind because we own the equipment.
Cleanroom-grade handling, ITAR documentation, Class-9 lithium hazmat, FAB equipment crating, GxP cold-chain. The vertical depth comes from running the 3PL operation in those industries for three decades.
Project44-class real-time visibility delivered inside the program on CargoWise. No separate TMS license, no separate visibility subscription, no third-party data hand-off. One platform, one invoice.
RK is privately held inside Exponential Partners — no PE clock, no IPO calendar, no exit pressure. We can underwrite a 24-month customer build that a PE-owned broker can’t.
When the program is escalated, you reach the same operating team that runs the warehouse, the forwarding, and the brokerage. No vendor-management overhead. No finger-pointing between providers. One owner.
Some shippers want a full managed-transportation program. Some want a specific lane brokered. Some want a control-tower-only layer over their existing carrier base. RK supports all three — on the same platform, with the same team.
RK owns the program end to end — capacity, RFP, audit, control tower, analytics, QBR. Best fit for a shipper consolidating from multiple vendors into one accountable operator. Single MSA, single bill, single team.
RK manages capacity on specific lanes — FTL, LTL, intermodal, drayage — while the shipper retains its own routing guide and TMS. The fastest way to start. Often the on-ramp to a fuller program.
RK delivers the platform and the data picture — lane management, audit, exception, analytics — over the shipper’s existing carrier base. Visibility as a service. Often the first step before a full transition.
A freight bill is a transaction. A managed transportation program is a system. The system always wins.
Send us your current carrier base, your top 20 lanes, and the manufacturing rhythm they support. We’ll come back with a Managed Transportation design that compresses cost, raises service, and gives you one team to call. Most consolidations land in under 90 days.