Sarcouncil Journal of Economics and Business Management

Abstract: Rental chassis are widely used in intermodal and landside transportation to provide flexible equipment capacity without requiring organizations to own the full chassis fleet. However, rental strategy is not solely a daily-rate decision. The economic outcome depends on demand stability, productive utilization, billing rules, maintenance responsibility, equipment availability, repositioning, and administrative effort. This review presents a milestone-based framework for managing rental chassis costs by connecting demand planning, sourcing, equipment allocation, transportation execution, usage visibility, return, billing validation, and portfolio optimization. The framework is designed for digital transportation management environments, including enterprise transportation management systems such as SAP Transportation Management (SAP TM), while remaining independent of any single implementation. The review combines a lifecycle process model with a total-cost framework and published 2026 screening benchmarks. An industry guide cited in this paper reports pool-rental rates of approximately $15–30 per day and long-term lease rates of approximately $8–12 per day, while indicating that rental may be appropriate below roughly 150–200 utilization days per year. Using the same 200-day basis for both rates, a unit-rate illustration produces a difference of $1,400–$3,600 per chassis; this is not a full annual lease-versus-rental comparison and is not a measured organizational saving. The paper therefore emphasizes a realized-value approach based on validated baseline cost, actual post-implementation cost, cost per productive day, utilization, paid idle days, availability, maintenance downtime, and invoice exception rate. The framework shows how milestone and utilization visibility can support more disciplined rental decisions while requiring financial value to be validated against actual contracts, operational data, and market quotations.