One Logistics Partner vs a Patchwork of Vendors | Explore Group
Why Energy Operators Are Rethinking the Vendor Stack
A single frac program can touch a proppant hauler, a water hauler, a crude marketer, a general freight carrier, and whoever handles the rig mats and mobilization in between. Multiply that across a multi-well pad, a multi-basin program, or a full-year drilling schedule, and an operator is coordinating a half dozen vendor relationships just to keep material moving. Each one has its own dispatch board, its own point of contact, its own invoicing cycle, and its own version of what happened on a given day. When something slips, the first job is not fixing the problem. It is figuring out which vendor owns it.
That coordination overhead rarely shows up on a rate sheet, but it shows up in the schedule. Explore Group was built in 2014 around a different premise: own the equipment and the supply, rather than broker pieces of it out, so that fewer relationships stand between a pad and the material it needs.
Challenge: Every Additional Vendor Is Another Handoff
Each vendor added to a program is another handoff point where information, and material, can get lost. A load status that has to pass from a hauler's dispatcher to an operator's field coordinator to a completions engineer loses precision at every step. When four or five vendors are each reporting their own slice of the picture, reconciling them into one accurate schedule becomes its own job.
Solution: Explore Group's frac sand last-mile logistics has run this way since 2017, moving proppant from origin into the blender, whether hopper bottom or container, with the equipment, personnel, rig mats, and mobilization included under one team. Full PO and allocation management is part of that same service, so an operator works from one dispatch picture instead of reconciling several.
Challenge: Allocation Data Gets Harder to Trust With More Hands on It
Allocation and PO tracking depend on consistent, timely reporting. When that reporting comes from separate vendors on separate systems, discrepancies compound, and an operator often does not find out about a gap until reconciliation happens well after the fact.
Solution: Because allocation management sits inside the same operation that runs the hauling, the reporting is not a downstream summary assembled from someone else's numbers. Explore Group delivers quarterly performance reviews after every pad and program, giving operators a consistent, recurring checkpoint rather than a scramble at contract renewal.
Crude Movement Carries the Same Coordination Risk
Proppant is not the only material where a fragmented vendor stack adds risk. Crude has to move from wellhead to market through gathering and trucking, often with a mix of pipeline and truck depending on takeaway conditions at a given time. Explore Group's Petroleum Liquids and Midstream operation runs crude marketing, gathering, and trucking backed by tank storage and pipeline connections across West Texas, so an operator already working with Explore Group on sand logistics is not necessarily adding a second, unrelated relationship to move crude out of the same program.
Freight Doesn't Stop at the Basin Line
A program's logistics needs rarely stay inside one mode or one region. Materials, equipment, and general freight move across the US, Mexico, and Canada, sometimes by truck, sometimes by intermodal or rail, occasionally by chartered ship. Explore Group's OTR Freight and Logistics division covers full truckload, intermodal, rail, ship chartering, procurement, warehousing, and logistics management, with K&K Trucking, based in Great Falls, Montana, running the refrigerated and temperature-controlled side of the fleet. An operator who needs basin-specific hauling one week and cross-border freight the next is not necessarily choosing between two different providers to get both.
What a Consolidated Fleet Actually Changes Day to Day
The practical case for fewer vendors is not abstract. Explore Group runs more than 100 owned trucks and more than 250 owned chassis and belly dumps, supported by more than 50 carrier partners for the capacity that flexes beyond the owned fleet. A team with a combined 40 years managing pipeline and rail operations carries that experience across programs rather than starting over with a new vendor's learning curve every time a contract changes hands.
Final Thoughts
None of this means a single provider is the right fit for every program, or that consolidating vendors is free of tradeoffs. It does mean that every vendor added to a supply chain is a relationship to manage, a dispatch board to check, and a version of events to reconcile if something goes wrong. Explore Group's model, built on owned equipment and supply across frac sand, crude, and general freight rather than brokered pieces of each, exists specifically to reduce that number. For operators evaluating whether their current vendor stack is doing more coordinating than delivering, that is the comparison worth running.
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