What is Carrier Analytics?

Carrier Analytics is a fully autonomous planning view of your carriers. It shows how each carrier performs over time using the information you already have: invoices, customs, emails, and milestone events. Desteia analyzes hundreds or thousands of your shipments automatically across rolling 30, 60, and 90 day periods, then presents a clear, always updating read you can use for allocation plans, budgets, and QBRs.

Carrier Analytics is a part of Desteia’s Strategic Analytics suite.

Why Carrier Analytics matters

Selecting the right carriers is a strategic choice. You want carriers that hold service, show stable performance over time, and earn their rates. You also want a consistent way to compare them and defend your plan. Carrier Analytics turns shipment history into trends you can trust, so you can choose partners, set allocations, and develop relationships with evidence.

How Carrier Analytics works

Desteia ingests your organization’s shipment data and ties each move to a carrier, a time window, and cost. We aggregate results into rolling 30, 60, and 90 day periods. Outliers are capped and comparisons are normalized within a carrier’s network, so you are not reading noise. The output is a carrier leaderboard with short summaries and trendlines.

How Desteia assesses carriers

We focus on a small set of carrier metrics assessed across different slices, allowing you to move between different views of your carrier data to answer different questions.

Metrics

• Transit Time P50
  Median door or port segment time by carrier and lane. The planning baseline.
  
  
  

• Transit Time P90
  90th percentile time. The buffer view that reveals long tail risk.
  
  
  

• ETA Accuracy @ T-7
  Share of shipments whose ETA, seven days before arrival, landed within a tight window of actual arrival. How early you can trust the plan.
  
  
  

• ETA Accuracy vs Original ETA
  Accuracy of the first ETA after loading at origin. Quality of the initial promise.
  
  
  

• Cost per Journey
  Average all in carrier cost per shipment or TEU for a lane. Your price level.
  
  
  

• Cost per Reliable Journey
  Effective cost adjusted for reliability. Average cost only on shipments that met the T-7 accuracy rule.
  
  

Slices

• Value
  Where the carrier sits now against your target for that metric.
  
  
  

• Trend
  Whether the metric is improving or deteriorating over recent months.
  
  
  

• Reliability
  How stable or jumpy the metric is over time.
  
  
  

• Acute vs Systemic
  Whether the pattern clusters within a few places or appears across the network.
  
  
  

How to use Carrier Analytics

Desteia Identifies Increasing Variability in Transit Times

For carrier F, Transit Time P50 stays steady while Transit Time P90 widens over the last 60 to 90 days, signaling weaker Reliability and rising buffer risk. Plan a modest allocation trim next quarter and keep a hedge with a steadier carrier until P90 stabilizes. Result: service holds without adding blanket buffer days.

Desteia Identifies Early Promise Drift

ETA Accuracy vs Original ETA declines for carrier I even though ETA Accuracy @ T-7 remains acceptable, which means the first promise is soft and creates replans. Plan a higher quality bar for the initial ETA in the next contract cycle and shift a small share to a carrier with stronger first ETA accuracy. Result: fewer appointment changes and cleaner labor scheduling.

Desteia Identifies A “Cheap” Carrier That Costs More In Practice

Carrier B shows a lower Cost per Journey than a peer, but weaker ETA Accuracy @ T-7 makes Cost per Reliable Journey higher over the last 90 days. Plan to move a measured share to the steadier carrier and use Cost per Reliable Journey in the QBR to hold B’s rate. Result: lower total cost with service maintained.

Desteia Identifies Acute Demurrage Drivers

Demurrage incidents linked to carrier D cluster on a small set of SKUs over the last 60 days, an Acute pattern driven by late vendor documents rather than carrier performance. Plan a vendor document SLA for the next cycle while keeping D’s allocation steady. Result: the demurrage forecast declines without unnecessary carrier changes.

Why Carrier Analytics?

• A single source of truth for carrier performance
  Leaderboard and summaries center on carriers. Lanes are a drill down when trends need context.
  
  

• Only the most important metrics
  Transit Time P50, Transit Time P90, ETA Accuracy @ T-7, ETA Accuracy vs Original ETA, Cost per Journey, and Cost per Reliable Journey.
  
  

• A dynamic, flexible analysis model
  Investigate Value, Trend, Reliability, and Acute vs Systemic for every metric across every carrier.
  
  

• Built for planning
  Rolling 30, 60, and 90 day windows with historical values and trendlines.
  
  

Get started

Reach out to us to take the first step toward a clearer planning view of carrier performance. We will help you turn shipment history into trends you can use for the next quarter’s plan.