Most disruptions in the middle mile don’t come from the supplier, they come from the journey. A closed motorway or a congested port can mean a lane that’s normally reliable stops moving, often for reasons that have nothing to do with anyone in your supply chain.
Alternate routing is how you protect against this risk. It’s a way of making sure your critical lanes have a backup. This article covers how to work out which lanes need that protection, what to check with your carrier, and how Amazon Freight can help.
Why single-route dependence is a risk
Here’s what’s worth understanding first, and why it changes how you plan a freight network.
Where single points of failure hide in a freight network
Most shippers think carefully about carrier risk. Fewer stop to think about those carrier’s lanes. It’s an easy thing to miss because a lane can look well covered on paper. You might have three different carriers quoting on the same lane, which feels like a sensible spread of risk.
But if all three of those carriers send their trucks down the same motorway, through the same crossing point, you haven’t built in a true backup. Disruption on that road, whether that’s a closure or a delay at the crossing, means all three carriers are affected at the same time, in the same way.
That’s why it’s worth going one level deeper than your carrier list. Ask each carrier what route they’d use for a given lane. Ideally, your carrier will already build-in route backups for a given lane. If not, choosing two carriers who use different roads or a different crossing point gives you a viable second option if the first one stops working.
Mapping primary and backup lanes
You don’t need to build a backup for every lane. Here’s how to prioritise.
Build a lane-level risk register
Start with a list of every lane you run, considering factors like the volume it carries and the revenue that depends on it. This puts on paper what you probably already sense about your network, but doing it properly, lane by lane, will help you move forward with confidence.
Once you have that list, score each lane two ways: how likely it is to be disrupted, and how much damage it would do if it was. You’ll usually find that a small number of lanes carry a disproportionate share of your revenue or your customer promises. Those are the ones worth prioritising.
Check that an alternative exists
Once you know which lanes matter most, check-in with your carrier and ask about backups. Ask: if the usual route for this lane isn’t available, what’s the alternative? A good answer names a different road or crossing point. A vague one tells you the redundancy isn’t really there.
Using mode flexibility as a release valve
There’s another way to build in flexibility, alongside routes and carriers: how you move the freight. Full truckload (FTL) means one dedicated trailer for your shipment. Less-than-truckload (LTL) means sharing trailer space with other shippers’ freight. Being able to switch between the two gives you a way to adjust when a lane’s under pressure.
Say a lane’s disrupted and you’ve suddenly got less freight to move than planned. LTL lets you keep it moving without paying for a full trailer that’s mostly empty. Or, say volume spikes unexpectedly. Consolidating into full loads can get it moving faster than several smaller LTL shipments would.
It’s worth knowing ahead of time which of your lanes could switch between FTL and LTL if you needed them to. Working that out in advance means it’s one less thing to figure out in the case of disruption.
How Amazon Freight supports this
Building alternate routing into your network is easier with the right freight provider behind you. Here’s how Amazon Freight can help.
Our online portal and GPS-tracked trailers mean you get real-time visibility and status updates throughout transit. Where a delay is detected, Amazon Freight automatically reroutes to the quickest available route, so the decision that would otherwise sit with your team, and the pressure that comes with making it quickly, is handled before it reaches you.
That sits on top of the network itself: over 10,000 carriers and 9,200+ owned trailers across the UK and EU, giving you route options on a lane that would take considerable time and relationship-building to source yourself. You also get deep mode flexibility, with FTL across the UK and Europe, and LTL available in the UK and Germany, so a lane can flex depending on what it needs at the time.
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Alternate routing in freight means having a genuinely different way to move a shipment on a critical lane, a different road, hub, crossing point, or carrier, so a single failure doesn’t stop the load moving. It’s one of the more practical ways shippers build supply chain resilience into their network, rather than relying on one route to hold up every time.
When a supply chain disruption hits, whether that’s a closed motorway, port congestion, or a carrier that can’t take the load, alternate routing means you already have a workable alternative in place. Instead of scrambling to find cover once the delay has already started, the switch has effectively already been decided.
Yes. Alternate routing is one of the core practices in logistics risk management, alongside things like lane-level risk registers and carrier diversification. It’s specifically about protecting the physical movement of goods, so it sits within a wider risk management approach rather than replacing it.
Beyond alternate routing, common supply chain resilience strategies include mapping which freight lanes carry the most risk and revenue, checking that carriers have genuine route alternatives rather than just different names on the same road, and building in mode flexibility between FTL and LTL so a lane can adjust to changes in volume.
It can add a small cost to maintain a backup on a given lane, but that’s usually far smaller than the cost of a lane failing with no alternative in place. Pricing out what a bad day would cost on your highest-volume lanes is what makes that comparison clear.
