Unresolved exceptions form a queue that many logistics organizations feel every day but rarely measure. When exceptions arrive faster than planners can investigate, coordinate, and close them, the backlog becomes an operating constraint just like dock congestion, labor shortage, or insufficient carrier capacity.

Each exception has an arrival time, service time, priority, and outcome. Some take seconds; others require multiple systems, partners, approvals, and calls. When arrival rate exceeds resolution capacity, work accumulates. Aging increases and more cases miss the window in which an inexpensive intervention was still possible. The backlog is another form of the decision bottleneck: unresolved work consumes operating capacity even when the physical network still has trucks, doors, labor, and inventory available.

Planner attention is finite. Time spent assembling context, chasing status, copying information, and routing approvals is capacity that cannot be used for optimization, relationship management, or novel problems. The organization can have sufficient physical assets and still underperform because decision work is queued.

AEM is moving toward selective autonomy: routine, high-frequency, bounded exceptions are increasingly handled by software while people focus on ambiguity, relationships, policy conflicts, and high-consequence decisions The highest leverage often comes from automating context assembly and repetitive resolution steps before automating the final decision. Even when a human retains approval, reducing research and administrative work can materially increase throughput.

Track open exceptions by class, age, business consequence, and owner. Measure median and tail resolution times, percentage resolved before the intervention deadline, recurrence, and auto-resolution rate. These measures make the constraint visible and help distinguish a technology problem from a policy, data, or staffing problem.

Not every exception deserves the same service level. High-value, time-sensitive issues should move through a fast lane. Low-consequence deviations may be suppressed or handled automatically. The operating model should allocate human judgment where its marginal value is highest.

Once the backlog is treated as a real queue, exception management becomes measurable. The objective is not to eliminate every exception; it is to build enough decision-and-action capacity that important exceptions are resolved before they become expensive.

The exception backlog deserves its own capacity plan

An unresolved exception queue behaves like any other operational backlog. Work arrives at a variable rate, each item consumes service capacity, priorities change, and aging can increase the eventual cost of resolution. Yet many organizations manage this queue through personal inboxes, spreadsheets, and tacit knowledge rather than explicit workload and service-level metrics.

Leaders should measure arrival rate, open backlog, age distribution, touches per exception, automated-resolution rate, escalation rate, and time to verified closure. Those measures reveal whether the constraint is insufficient staffing, poor context, unclear authority, fragmented execution, or an overly sensitive detection layer. AEM creates value when it changes the economics of that queue, not merely when it adds AI to the interface.

Backlog age can reveal when consequence is compounding

Not all open exceptions deteriorate at the same rate. Some can wait with little effect; others become more expensive every minute as customer windows close, carrier options disappear, inventory commitments tighten, or recovery choices narrow. That makes age distribution more useful than a simple count of open items. Operations leaders should combine backlog age with consequence and decision urgency so the queue is worked according to the economics of delay. An AEM platform should help expose that relationship and make it possible to compare whether automation, better context, or clearer authority actually changes the service rate of the exception process.

The 2026 Market Map is designed to help organizations understand the structure of the AEM market, evaluate provider differences, and identify the capabilities most relevant to their operating environment. If your organization is evaluating Autonomous Exception Management capabilities or defining an exception-management strategy, I would be glad to provide the Market Map brochure and discuss the evaluation questions and provider differences most relevant to your requirements.

Request the AEM Market Map Brochure

For technology providers

Providers may request the brochure, discuss the research framework, or contact me to confirm how their capabilities are represented in the market assessment.

Discuss the research or confirm your profile

Supply chain technology is changing, and the traditional boundaries between software applications are becoming less distinct.

Warehouse Management Systems manage warehouse operations. Transportation Management Systems manage freight. Supply Chain Planning systems balance demand, supply, inventory, and capacity. These categories remain important, but increasingly, the decisions they support overlap.

At the same time, newer technologies such as Autonomous Exception Management and Decision Intelligence are introducing capabilities that extend across traditional application boundaries.

The challenge for companies is no longer simply selecting the best software in each category. It is determining how these systems should work together, where responsibility for decisions resides, and how information becomes operational action.

In this ARC Advisory Group webinar, Beyond the Silos: Five MarketMaps Shaping the Next Supply Chain Technology Architecture, I examine five technology markets and what their evolution means for enterprise supply chain architecture.

Five Markets, One Operating Architecture

The webinar draws on ARC’s MarketMap research across five markets:

Warehouse Management Systems (WMS): The evolution from inventory and transaction management toward broader execution orchestration, including labor, robotics, automation, and dynamic operational priorities.

Transportation Management Systems (TMS): The transition from transportation planning and freight execution toward continuous operational control, where disruptions trigger decisions about carriers, routing, appointments, service, and cost.

Autonomous Exception Management (AEM): Moving beyond exception visibility and alerts toward prioritized, governed responses that coordinate action across multiple enterprise systems.

Decision Intelligence (DI): Applying analytics, optimization, simulation, and AI to evaluate competing business objectives and support decisions across functional boundaries.

Supply Chain Planning (SCP): The evolution toward more continuous planning, where real-time operational information informs decisions without unnecessarily disrupting established plans.

Each market is evolving independently, but some of the most consequential developments are occurring where their capabilities intersect.

The Execution Control Problem

Consider a late inbound shipment.

A transportation system identifies the delay. The warehouse may need to adjust labor and outbound processing. Planning may need to reconsider inventory allocation. An exception management application may identify the broader operational consequences, while a Decision Intelligence platform evaluates possible responses.

Several systems may recognize the problem. Several may recommend a solution.

But which system should make the decision? Who has authority to act? And how do we know whether the action improved the outcome?

These questions become increasingly important as AI and autonomous capabilities enter enterprise operations.

More automation does not automatically produce better coordination. Without clear responsibilities, organizations risk introducing new complexity into already complicated operating environments.

What ARC’s MarketMaps Tell Us

ARC MarketMaps evaluate technology suppliers across solution capabilities and strategic vision. They provide a structured way to understand supplier strengths, competitive positioning, and market direction.

But selecting technology requires more than identifying highly positioned suppliers.

Companies need to assess operational requirements, integration capabilities, decision ownership, implementation maturity, and the ability to support changing business conditions.

The objective is not necessarily to consolidate everything into a single software platform. It is to establish an architecture in which specialized applications can work together effectively.

Watch the Full Webinar

In the complete presentation, I examine the evolution of all five technology markets, explain how ARC evaluates suppliers, and outline five practical questions companies should ask before making their next technology investment.

The central argument is straightforward: The next significant improvement in supply chain performance will come not simply from collecting more information or adding more AI, but from turning that information into coordinated, accountable operational decisions.

Watch the full ARC Advisory Group webinar below.

The post Beyond the Silos: Five MarketMaps Shaping the Next Supply Chain Technology Architecture appeared first on Logistics Viewpoints.

If your procurement strategy still revolves around a single annual tender, you’re not managing freight costs — you’re managing the gap between what you locked in and what the market is actually doing.

I’ve had this conversation with enterprise procurement teams more times than I can count. The annual RFP rhythm made sense for a long time. But as I said in a recent webinar: “The 12-month cycles that tenders are currently having can actually not deal with the changes in the market.”

Today, BAF surcharges can swing 15–25% within a single quarter. Geopolitical events reshape trade lanes overnight. And yet most procurement teams are still trying to manage this volatility with a process designed for a much calmer era.

The Problem With Treating Procurement as an Annual Event

What I see most often is this: organizations react to market trends rather than getting ahead of them. They see what’s happening, go out and do their tender, keep their existing strategies — and then deal with the consequences. Higher prices. More workload. Teams chasing carriers across spreadsheets and disconnected systems.

The real issue isn’t that annual tenders are wrong. It’s that on their own, they’re too slow for a market that moves faster than the contract cycle. When the market shifts, most teams have three options: ignore it, react informally through ad-hoc renegotiations, or build a repeatable way to realign rates with reality. The third is what agile procurement is designed to solve.

What Agile Procurement Actually Means in Practice

When I talk about agile procurement, I’m not talking about doing more tenders. It all comes down to three things: standardize and automate your workflows, benchmark against what’s actually happening in the market, and adjust — not just fuel prices and carrier rates, but your broader strategy. Being on top of the market instead of reacting to it.

In practice, the teams getting this right have stopped treating procurement as something they “do in Q1” and started treating it as an ongoing discipline that runs year-round.

Here are the 5 steps I recommend to get started:

Step 1: Get Your Data in Order

Everything else in agile procurement depends on this. As I often say to customers: procurement data — all our data — that’s the heart of everything. Without good data, you cannot do anything. You cannot act accordingly.

If your rate data is scattered across spreadsheets, carrier emails, and disconnected systems, you can’t move quickly — and neither can your carriers. Developing a standardized, customizable rate card format ensures every carrier submits comparable information. Centralizing this in a cloud-based platform gives all stakeholders real-time access to a single source of truth.

Step 2: Automate Everything That Doesn’t Require Human Judgment

Manual freight procurement is costing your team time it doesn’t have. RfQ generation, carrier invitation, rate card validation, sanity checks, best-rate calculations — none of these require human judgment. They require consistency, speed, and accuracy.

With Freightos Procure, you define your RfQ templates once, and for the next RfQ, you can just launch it within minutes. The carrier invitations, the reminders, the sense checks on whether the data is correct — all that workload that is done manually, often across Teams chats and master Excel spreadsheets — all of that is taken away.

That’s also where the nature of the work changes. Instead of spending days copying and reconciling numbers, procurement professionals spend more time on the things only they can do: balancing cost with service and risk, explaining trade-offs to internal stakeholders, and building more strategic carrier relationships.

Step 3: Know What the Market Is Actually Paying

One of the most common gaps I see in enterprise freight procurement is the absence of reliable, independent benchmarking data. Most teams know roughly where their rates sit — but not precisely how they compare to what the market is actually paying across their specific lanes.

What I see a lot is enterprise shippers simply comparing their existing pre-qualified carriers against each other. They’re launching their RfQ with their carrier database and just looking at the rates. But what’s really important is that you’re looking also at the market — especially when you see how it’s changing. If you’re not looking at the market, you might miss that there is an increase coming, and then you align with a carrier on one-year rates — and the market changes, the fuel prices change, and you end up paying on top even if something different was agreed.

Freightos Terminal gives procurement teams daily-updated spot and contract benchmarks across ocean and air, sourced from over $50 billion in real commercial freight spend. But what I find particularly powerful is the forecasting capability — we give a forecast for up to six months, predicting how the market is actually changing. That’s helping you to tailor your strategy to how the market will be reacting before you see it, so you can prepare accordingly and save money.

Step 4: Run Regular Mini-Bids and Track What’s Working

Annual contracts alone can’t keep pace with market volatility. The teams seeing the biggest procurement gains have moved to a model where they run structured mini-bids on volatile lanes throughout the year — not just at annual tender time.

The logic is straightforward. Because we’re so fast with running RfQs and launching tenders, you can actually check what’s going on, how the market is moving, and decide not to tender your entire pack of lanes. You can look at where the market is going, what your forecasting is saying. Is it going down? Makes sense to tender in that region. Are prices going up? It might make more sense to extend your rates with your existing carriers.

With Freightos Procure, you look at it, you see a recommendation from the tool, you go in, you tender, and within six minutes or less, your mini-bid is on the market and your carriers can work with it.

One question I get often is whether to commit to fixed rates for a full year or stay more flexible. My view: I would always recommend to stay flexible. With a one-year contract in place, you always have to renegotiate if anything happens. I would rather go into something more transactional that you can handle disruptions with more easily.

I also think about it like a portfolio. You should not invest only in one stock. It’s really good to spread the volumes — have some spot, have some mini-bids, have some RfQs. Make sure your network is still running.

Step 5: Don’t Let Fuel and BAF Become a Passive Cost

This is the area where I see most enterprise procurement teams leaving the most money on the table.

Fuel is one of the biggest cost drivers — not just lately, but in general. And the reality is that even if you have an annual contract, during the year the fuel prices can change dramatically. In January you can have a fuel price that is X, and five months later it can go up significantly. It’s really important that all of that is in your rate and that you can always track it back — because then you can also justify it internally.

That’s why at Freightos we developed a feature that can automatically trigger workflows and update fuel prices with your carriers. You can decide if you want to be the one steering that process, or if you actually ask your carriers to update the fuel. The setup is straightforward — for example, if the index is growing by 5%, trigger the update and adjust the fuel price by 3.5%. You set it up once and then it runs automatically in the background. You just need to see what was changed, approve it, and you can bring in indices from wherever you want — for example, the jet fuel index for air freight.

Combined with Freightos Terminal’s real-time market intelligence and the Freightos Baltic Index (FBX), procurement teams can keep fuel costs anchored to actual market conditions year-round — without the overhead of a full renegotiation every time the market moves.

What Changes When You Get This Right

When I talk to teams that have made this shift, a few things consistently come up.

Finance conversations become easier. Instead of defending why your January forecast missed a market shift in August, you can show how your rates track benchmarks over time — and where you chose to lock in versus stay flexible.

Carrier relationships improve. A procurement team that brings data, clarity, and a predictable cadence to negotiations is more attractive than one that disappears for a year and then demands a major rate cut with 10 days’ notice.

Procurement becomes more credible internally. When your sourcing rhythm matches the market’s rhythm, it’s much easier to defend both your costs and your strategy to finance and operations leadership.

A Simple Way to Start

You don’t need a multi-year transformation to begin. Start by auditing where your team’s time actually goes — how much of it is spent on manual rate card validation, carrier chasing, and BAF reconciliation? That’s your baseline.

Pick one area and run it properly for one quarter. If it delivers better outcomes with less manual overhead, you have a proof point. The goal isn’t to do more procurement events. It’s to stop making one big, brittle annual bet and start managing freight costs as if market volatility is the norm — because it is.

Download our 5-step playbook to see exactly how leading enterprise procurement teams are making the shift.

The post 5 Steps to Manage Freight Costs in 2027 appeared first on Freightos.