XPO (CCJ Top 250, No. 8) said on Tuesday it is launching an in-house, team driver, over-the-road operation – part of the company’s previously announced strategy to insource third-party linehaul carrier miles to drive greater efficiency, expected cost savings and better service for customers.
Dubbed the Road Flex program, the initiative is already underway with sleeper teams running from bases in Dallas and Phoenix. The company expects to expand this operation to additional service centers in 2024. To support the program, the company said it is recruiting teams of long-haul drivers who will run dedicated routes between XPO facilities in trucks equipped with sleeping quarters and other amenities.
"It’ll enable us both to reduce costs and improve service for our customers by minimizing freight re-handling and expediting deliveries," Tim Staroba, president of the East Division at XPO, said of the Road Flex program.
A typical workweek for Road Flex team drivers will consist of five days on the road hauling XPO truckloads between XPO LTL sites where they will then be handled by LTL, followed by two days off. While schedules may occasionally vary based on network conditions, "XPO is committed to providing workplace flexibility and balance, along with industry-leading compensation and benefits," the company said.
Headquartered in Greenwich, Connecticut, XPO is one of the largest providers of asset-based less-than-truckload (LTL) transportation in North America and the debut of its Road Flex program isn't the company first foray into the truckload segment, even if Road Flex brings the company back into the segment in a limited and internal-only capacity. XPO in 2016 sold its truckload business –the bulk of which came via acquisition of Con-way a year earlier — to TFI (No. 4) for approximately $558 million. The sale at that time, according to then-XPO Chairman and CEO Brad Jacobs, was a cost cutting measure and a move that lessened "the cyclicality of our operations.”
XPO has been in a post-pandemic makeover of its business. Last March it sold its intermodal business to STG Logistics for $710 million, a move that was in support a broader plan that called for spinning off XPO's brokerage business, leaving the LTL business and brokerage as two separate, publicly traded companies. It had also planned to sell off its European business but pulled the division off the market late last year citing "weakened capital markets."
