Picture the timeline of a typical enterprise freight RFP. Data collection starts in September. Bid rounds run through November. Awards go out in January, and the new routing guide takes effect in March. By the time those rates go live, the market data behind them is six months old. In a flat market, that lag is survivable. In this one, it is expensive.

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National tender rejection rates climbed to nearly 14.3 percent in early February, the highest reading since mid-2022, according to a monthly report from SONAR and Ryder. By June, executives at J.B. Hunt were telling analysts that routing guides are falling apart at an accelerated pace, with mini-bid activity spiking and some shippers forced to rebid their entire freight book. Add the volume whipsaws that come with shifting trade policy, a pressure Global Trade has covered in its reporting on tariff volatility and logistics networks, and the yearly bid cycle starts to look less like a procurement strategy and more like a habit.

The response we are seeing from leading transportation teams is not to run the annual RFP harder. It is to stop treating procurement as an annual event at all.

Why the Yearly Bid Cycle Keeps Falling Behind

The annual RFP was built for a market that repriced slowly. Today, spot rates move weekly, and carriers make tender decisions load by load. When the spread between a shipper’s contract rate and the current spot market gets wide enough, primary carriers start rejecting tenders. Freight cascades to backup carriers at higher rates, and whatever falls through the routing guide entirely gets covered on the spot market at a premium. The savings the RFP promised in January quietly evaporate by summer.

This cuts both ways. In a soft market, shippers locked into last year’s contract rates overpay for months while the spot market sits well below them. In a tightening market, the routing guide fails and the real cost of freight bears little resemblance to the bid file. Either way, the shipper is pricing a twelve-month commitment off a snapshot that stops being true almost immediately.

The problem is not the RFP itself. Contracts still matter, and carriers still need volume commitments to plan their networks. The problem is the assumption that a price set once a year can describe a market that no longer holds still.

What Continuous Freight Procurement Looks Like

Continuous freight procurement, sometimes called an evergreen freight model, replaces the single annual bid with a rolling cadence of smaller pricing events. Instead of locking every lane for twelve months, transportation teams keep long-term contracts on their stable lanes, reprice volatile lanes through quarterly or monthly mini-bids, and handle genuinely unpredictable freight through always-on quoting against a broad carrier pool. In practice, the model rests on four components.

Always-on RFQs

Rather than saving up pricing questions for the annual event, teams can put any lane out to bid at any time. New lanes, seasonal surges, and network changes get priced when they happen, not five months later.

Mini-bids

These are small, targeted bids covering a subset of lanes, usually the ones where routing guide compliance has slipped or the contract rate has drifted far from market. A mini-bid on fifteen lanes takes days, not months, and the J.B. Hunt commentary above confirms how quickly this practice is spreading.

Live rate benchmarking

Continuous procurement only works if you know what the market rate actually is right now, lane by lane. Benchmarking every contract and spot rate against current market data tells you which lanes to leave alone and which ones are quietly bleeding money.

Carrier scorecards

Repricing more often means award decisions come up more often, and price alone is a poor basis for them. Scorecards tracking tender acceptance, on-time performance, and responsiveness keep the focus on total cost of service. A carrier that is cheap but sits at your dock for hours is not cheap, as anyone who has fought truck detention knows.

Where the Savings Actually Come From

The first source of savings is simply more competition per pricing decision. Most quoting still happens over email, where a request goes to a handful of incumbent carriers and half the messages never get a reply. Running the same request through a freight quoting platform puts it in front of the full carrier list at once, returns normalized quotes on one screen, and scores each one against live market conditions before anything gets booked.

The second source is timing. When you can reprice a lane the week it drifts out of tolerance, you capture soft-market savings that an annual cycle would leave on the table for months, and you fix failing lanes before cascade costs pile up.

Across the Emerge platform, shippers booking freight capacity using Dynamic Book it Now have achieved rates averaging 8.5 percent below market benchmarks, with the most disciplined programs running as much as 23 percent below. Dollar Tree is forecasting roughly six million dollars in year-over-year savings from this approach, and Pepsi Bottling Ventures has compressed bid cycles that once took months into a couple of hours. Those figures come from our own customer base, so treat them as directional rather than universal. The mechanism behind them, though, is not proprietary: more bidders per decision, priced against live benchmarks, produces better rates. That is true on any platform and in any market.

Making the Shift Without Damaging Carrier Relationships

The most common objection to continuous procurement is that constant repricing will read as a race to the bottom and drive good carriers away. It is a fair concern, and the honest answer is that a badly run continuous program absolutely can do that. A well-run one tends to do the opposite, for three reasons.

First, mini-bids work in both directions. In a tightening market, a quarterly repricing window is the carrier’s chance to correct a rate that has become unprofitable, which beats the alternative of rejecting tenders and straining the relationship. Carriers do not leave shippers who reprice on a predictable cadence. They leave shippers who are unpredictable, slow to pay, or hard to work with at the dock.

Second, scorecards make good performance durable. When awards factor in tender acceptance and on-time delivery rather than rate alone, reliable carriers keep winning freight even when they are not the cheapest option in the stack. That is a stronger loyalty mechanism than a twelve-month contract that both sides know may not survive the year.

Third, incumbents keep the first look. Continuous procurement does not mean throwing every lane open to strangers every quarter. Most programs give incumbent carriers the chance to hold their freight at a refreshed rate before a lane goes out to the wider market.

How to Start Without Blowing Up What Works

No transportation team should rip out its routing guide overnight, and none of the shippers we work with did. The transition usually follows the same sequence.

Benchmark first. Before changing anything, measure every contract rate against the current market. This tells you the real size of the problem and usually surfaces a handful of lanes responsible for most of the drift.

Segment your network. Stable, high-volume lanes with healthy compliance belong in annual contracts. Lanes with volatile demand, chronic rejection problems, or wide rate drift are candidates for mini-bids. Low-volume and irregular freight moves to always-on spot quoting.

Pilot the volatile segment. Run your first mini-bid on the ten or fifteen worst lanes and compare the results against what the routing guide was actually delivering, including cascade and spot coverage costs, not the paper rate.

Build the scorecard before you need it. Start tracking acceptance and service metrics now so that when repricing decisions come up, you are rewarding performance instead of chasing the lowest number.

The annual RFP is not going to disappear, and it should not. But its role is shrinking from the whole of freight procurement to one tool among several. The shippers pulling ahead in this market are the ones treating procurement as a continuous discipline, priced against the market as it is, rather than a yearly event priced against the market as it was. Given how this year is going, that gap is only getting wider.

About the Author

Brittney Reed, a Sr. Marketing Manager writes about freight procurement and transportation spend management at Emerge, a Scottsdale, Arizona based procurement platform that helps shippers run RFPs, mini-bids, and spot quoting against live market benchmarks. Shippers including Pepsi Bottling Ventures and Dollar Tree use Emerge to manage their transportation spend.