I must admit that after reading the findings of our 15th Annual Masters of Logistics study I was filled with a sense of relief—and, oddly enough, a hint of self-fulfillment.

After nearly two years of attempting to manage steadily rising logistics costs in the face of declining service, shippers are reporting that they're going back to the drawing board to re-engineer their distribution strategies and shift their freight dollars among the modes to better control costs. In short, shippers are heeding LM's 2006 mantra: Control what you can control.

Respondents to this year's study told us that they continue to brace themselves for more increases in freight costs—hardly a surprise. They also said that they're implementing shipment consolidation and improving visibility across their supply chains. However, they admit that those tactics simply aren't going to be enough. “Shippers have tried all the tactics out there,” said Mary Holcomb of the University of Tennessee and a member of our research team, “and in the last twelve to eighteen months they've concluded that what they need to change is the network.”

The bottom line: Shippers report that they're not only rearranging their spending patterns, they're also changing their networks. They're picking up the phone and making small, tactical changes that don't demand massive IT investment or high-level buy-in. For example, we found that for the third consecutive year, readers are pulling a little more money away from truckload and putting more emphasis on dedicated contract carriage and regional LTL. Small-package services saw a sizable jump this year, from 6.4 percent of respondents' total budgets to 10.05 percent, indicating a shift to smaller shipments. And this is just scratching the surface of the research findings.

How do you “control what you can control”? The first step toward enlightenment is to fully digest our analysis of the Masters research. The Masters of Logistics survey offers the industry a crystalline snapshot of emerging logistics trends and provides vital benchmarking data on transportation and distribution practices. As in years past, our research team included key players from Georgia Southern University, the University of Tennessee, the consulting firm Capgemini, and technology partners Oracle and Intel.

But this month's cover story is just one-half of the Masters of Logistics experience. Once again, LM is bringing the findings to life in an interactive webcast that will go live on Wednesday, September 27. Research team leaders Karl Manrodt of Georgia Southern University and Mary Holcomb of the University of Tennessee will join me in a presentation of this year's complete findings. Watch your e-mail inbox for information or go to www.logisticsmgmt.com/masters to register.