Visibility Shows the Delay. It Does Not Fill a $2.34 Empty Mile
A visibility platform can show a delayed shipment, a lane problem, a capacity constraint or a service risk. It does not say what to do next, who should act, or which trade-off to take across cost, service, capacity, utilization and the customer. That call is still a planner's. The American Transportation Research Institute's 2026 Analysis of the Operational Costs of Trucking put the average cost of running a truck at $2.336 per mile in 2025, up 3.4% from $2.260 in 2024. Excluding fuel, the cost rose 4.2%, from $1.779 to $1.854. An empty mile still costs. Seeing it does not fill it.
The Alert Is Not the Decision
Ajesh Kapoor, founder and chief executive of SemiCab, said in written comments following a query from The Supply Chainer that the last two decades of supply chain technology largely solved for record keeping and visibility. "That was necessary progress. The next leap will come from helping organizations make better operational decisions, not just giving them more information. The shift now is from systems of record and visibility to systems of intelligence."
The gap, he said, is no longer in seeing that something has happened. It is in converting that visibility into the right operational response. "A visibility platform can show a delayed shipment, a lane issue, a capacity constraint, or a service risk. But the operational question is: What should be done next, who should act, and what trade-off should be made across cost, service, capacity, utilization, and customer impact?" Many organizations still use manual judgment on complex freight problems. Freight is a network. The information may be available while the decision is still made in fragments. The next layer, he said, has to move teams from awareness to action by interpreting the situation, evaluating alternatives and guiding execution across the network.
The same limit is already on the record. In The Supply Chainer's piece on why visibility is not enough in WMS and TMS, Bruce Shields of ABS Tag & Title said: "Companies have invested significant capital in technology over the last several years, only to find that visibility does not fix execution challenges."
More Data Is Still a Fragment
Better data, Kapoor said, improves awareness. It does not automatically create better judgment. A single move can affect transportation cost, service levels, carrier utilization, facility schedules, future capacity and customer commitments. "If a system cannot reason across those variables, more data can become more noise. Teams may know more, but still struggle to decide faster or better." The missing layer, in his account, is not information. It is the ability to convert data into structured decisions that improve outcomes across the network.
The barrier is structural. Supply chains are connected in reality and fragmented in operation. Most technology, he said, has been built to record activity or report exceptions. Fewer systems have been built to coordinate decisions across cost, service, capacity, utilization and execution. That is why execution cannot keep pace with the information. The network moves continuously. The operating model still depends on planner experience, manual coordination and fragmented decisions. What is needed, he said, is a connected decision layer that plans freight as one network, not as disconnected lane and shipment calls.
The Dashboard Has Stopped Paying
Kapoor did not dismiss the visibility layer. It created real value, he said, and moved supply chains from blind execution to greater transparency. That foundation remains important. "But visibility by itself is not enough to create the next level of performance improvement. Once an organization can see what is happening, the focus can shift to whether it can act intelligently on that information." The next frontier is not another dashboard or exception alert. It is decision-making at the network level: understanding conditions, evaluating trade-offs and guiding execution. The question for leaders, he said, is shifting from whether they can see what is happening to whether the organization makes better decisions because of what it sees.
A $2.336 mile does not care that the exception was on a screen. The cost lands when the next move is still a manual call on one lane, while the empty truck, the facility schedule and the customer commitment sit in another system.
