Your carrier scorecard probably tracks on-time delivery rates, damage claims, and transit times. You review the reports, compare carriers against each other, and assume the data tells you who’s performing and who isn’t.

But what if those metrics are steering you in the wrong direction?

Most carrier scorecards obsess over outcomes while ignoring context. A carrier gets dinged for a late delivery caused by a customs hold they couldn’t control. Claims get logged without investigating whether packaging or handling was the real culprit. The numbers pile up, fingers get pointed, and the relationship between shipper and carrier turns adversarial instead of productive.

You end up with a scorecard that assigns blame rather than drives improvement. Worse, everyone gets really good at optimizing for the wrong things.

Mallory Alexander approaches carrier performance measurement differently. We’ll walk through the three biggest flaws in conventional scorecards and what genuinely works.

Flaw #1: Penalizing Carriers for What They Can’t Control (Uncontrollable Metrics)
Your carrier scorecard probably treats every late delivery the same. A truck stuck in a snowstorm gets the same black mark as a driver who took a wrong turn. A customs hold triggered by incomplete paperwork from your team still dings the carrier’s on-time percentage.

Fair on the surface. Late is late, right?

Not exactly. When you lump controllable delays together with weather events, port congestion, and shipper errors, you create a scorecard that punishes partners for problems they didn’t cause. Carriers learn to pad transit times and build in buffers rather than actually improve operations. The metric becomes something to game rather than a tool for getting better.

Smart shippers track two numbers: raw on-time delivery and controllable on-time delivery. The first reflects what your customers experience. The second reveals what your carriers can actually influence.

Both matter, but only the second drives fair, productive accountability.

Flaw #2: Looking Backward Instead of Forward (Lagging vs. Leading Indicators)
Even when your carrier scorecard measures the right things, chances are it measures them at the wrong time.

Late deliveries, damage claims, and missed appointments are lagging indicators. They tell you what already went wrong. By the time those numbers hit your quarterly report, the freight has shipped, the customer has complained, and the damage is done. You’re left explaining problems instead of preventing them.

Instead, a useful scorecard watches for leading indicators, or warning signs, before failures materialize. Declining tender acceptance rates often signal an overcommitted carrier. A spike in documentation errors usually predicts customs delays the following month. Shrinking lead times on bookings can point to corners being cut somewhere in the process.

The difference matters because leading indicators give you room to act. A carrier scorecard built around predictive metrics lets you intervene early and solve problems while solutions still exist. Lagging metrics just help you assign blame after the damage is done.

Flaw #3: Assigning Blame Instead of Finding Solutions (Lack of Shared Root-Cause Ownership)
Most carrier scorecards operate like a courtroom. Someone has to be guilty, and the carrier usually takes the fall.

But shipping failures rarely trace back to a single source. A late delivery might start with a production delay at your facility, get compounded by a documentation error from a broker, and land on the carrier’s record because they’re the last link in the chain. Your scorecard captures the outcome and assigns the blame. The root cause never gets addressed.

That dynamic poisons the shipper-carrier relationship. Carriers stop collaborating and start defending. Problems persist because nobody digs past the surface. Effective carrier scorecards replace blame with shared ownership. They invite carriers to review data, flag discrepancies, and surface systemic issues that span multiple partners. When both sides commit to finding root causes together, you stop playing defense and start solving the problems that actually hurt your supply chain.

Where Mallory Alexander Enters the Picture
So your carrier scorecard needs an overhaul. You need real-time data instead of month-old reports. You need metrics that reflect what carriers can control. And you need a system that drives collaboration rather than conflict. Mallory Alexander built its platform and services around exactly those principles.

* Real-Time Visibility Through myMALLORY: Our myMALLORY portal tracks shipments across ocean, air, and ground 24/7. You see live ETAs, port statuses, and cost breakdowns the moment conditions change. No more discovering a delay three days after it happened.
* Customizable Dashboards and KPIs: One-size-fits-all scorecards fail because your business isn’t one size fits all. myMALLORY lets you choose which metrics matter and build dashboards around your specific lanes, carriers, and operational priorities.
* Clean Data You Can Trust: Our business analysts vet every data point for accuracy before it hits your reports. Missing time stamps and mismatched BOLs get resolved before they skew your scorecard and send you chasing phantom problems.
* Proactive Problem-Solving: Real-time data only matters if you act on it. Mallory flags leading indicators like capacity constraints and port congestion so you can adjust routing or refile paperwork before small issues become big ones.
* True Partnership Through 4PL Integration: Mallory’s logistics team audits warehouses, coordinates across transport modes, and serves as a single point of contact for your entire supply chain. We share data with carriers and work alongside them to fix root causes rather than just document failures.

Stop Keeping Score and Start Making Progress
A carrier scorecard should make your supply chain better. But when you penalize carriers for weather delays, measure problems only after they’ve blown up, and treat every failure as someone else’s fault, you end up with a system that rewards finger-pointing over problem-solving. Your carriers learn to game the metrics. Your team learns to pass the blame. And the same issues keep showing up quarter after quarter while everyone’s numbers look fine on paper.

Mallory Alexander has spent over a century moving freight, and we’ve seen every version of the blame game play out. That’s why everything we offer revolves around the principles covered here: dashboards you customize to your lanes and priorities, analysts who catch data errors before they corrupt your reports, and a 4PL team that sits down with your carriers to solve problems instead of just pointing at spreadsheets. We’d rather help you prevent the late shipment than help you document whose fault it was.

Contact us when you’re ready to build a carrier scorecard that moves the needle.