Posts

Most brokers eventually meet the carrier that looked fine on paper and then no-showed a pickup, or worse, ran a load without valid cargo insurance. The packet was signed. The W-9 was on file. Nobody caught the gap because nobody wrote down what “caught” actually means. This is the checklist to hand a new operations hire on day one — not a philosophy of vetting, just the steps in order, with the reasons attached so people don’t skip them under pressure. ...

Every broker and every carrier dispatcher knows the moment. A shipper calls with a load, you quote it, they say “send me the rate con,” and then the load sits in limbo while everyone waits on an email thread. Somebody’s out of office. Somebody attaches the wrong version. Somebody signs it but forgets to send it back, and now you’ve got a truck rolling toward a pickup on a verbal agreement and a prayer. ...

Most small carriers and brokerages start the same way: a spreadsheet someone built on a slow Tuesday, and it never stopped growing. Now it’s got fifteen tabs, three macros nobody remembers writing, and a driver pay formula that only works if you don’t sort column G. It’s not that spreadsheets are bad. It’s that they were never built to run dispatch for a fleet with more than a handful of trucks, and at some point the workaround cost more than the fix. ...

If you’re running a brokerage with a handful of your own trucks — or a carrier that’s started brokering overflow freight to keep customers happy — you already know the headache. You’re logging into one system to tender loads to your own drivers and another to manage the carriers you’ve booked for the loads you don’t have equipment for. Two logins, two rate structures, two places where a RateCon can get lost. ...

Picture a dispatcher at a 20-truck carrier who wants to know where a load is right now, and the honest answer is “let me call the driver and find out.” That’s not a technology problem in theory. In practice, it’s the reason detention disputes drag on, the reason a customer’s tracking portal request turns into an awkward phone tag session, and the reason a driver gets a check call at 6 a.m. asking something the dispatcher should already know. ...

Somebody on your team probably got told once that EDI is a big-broker thing — a Coyote or Echo problem, not a “we run 30 trucks and a shared inbox” problem. That’s wrong, and it’s costing you loads. Shippers and their routing guides don’t care how many power units you dispatch. If a manufacturer’s supply chain team runs their tender process through EDI 204, you either connect to it or you don’t get the freight. Plenty of small brokers assume that door is closed to them because “EDI” sounds like a six-figure IT project. It isn’t anymore, and the brokers who figure that out first are the ones picking up dedicated lanes their competitors can’t even see. ...

Buying a TMS is a lot like buying a used truck. The paint job tells you nothing about what’s happening under the hood, and the salesperson’s job is to keep your eyes on the paint. Most TMS evaluations fail for the same reason: brokers and carriers shop features when they should be shopping fit and honesty. The short answer: to choose a TMS, write down how a load moves through your business today, make every vendor demo a messy real load (not the happy path), get the full price in writing (per user, per load, add-ons), and run a free trial on a week of your own freight before you sign. The checklist below breaks that down. Use it against any vendor you’re looking at, including us. ...

Most dispatch software trials get wasted. Someone signs up on a Tuesday afternoon, clicks around the dashboard for ten minutes, gets pulled into a check call, and never opens the tab again. Thirty days later the trial expires, and the only thing anyone learned is what the login screen looks like. That’s not the evaluator’s fault. Dispatchers and ops managers don’t have spare hours to “explore a platform.” You’re covering loads, chasing PODs, and fielding the driver sitting at a shipper with a detention clock running. A trial has to prove itself in the middle of real work. ...

A 25-truck fleet sits at a crossroads. You’ve outgrown the days when you could track everything on a notepad and a few phone calls, but you’re nowhere near the size where an IT department runs an enterprise system. Success is creating its own problems. The 25-truck reality check At 25 trucks, the volume is serious. Example (illustrative numbers): if each truck averages 12 to 20 loads a month, depending on length of haul, that’s 25 × 12 = 300 to 25 × 20 = 500 loads a month. Each load carries appointments, a rate confirmation, a BOL, a POD, maybe detention, and a line on someone’s settlement. That’s thousands of pieces of information a month. ...

Running three trucks feels manageable with a clipboard and a phone. You know every driver personally, remember which loads are running late, and keep detention in your head. But somewhere around truck number ten, that informal system starts cracking. Dispatch complexity explodes At three trucks, dispatch means knowing one driver runs the Southeast lanes, one handles local work, and one takes whatever’s left. Simple, clear, personal. With ten trucks, you’re juggling driver preferences, equipment types, hours of service, and where every truck will be empty tomorrow. One driver just delivered in Phoenix but needs to be home in Memphis by Friday. Another is sitting in detention in Atlanta while a hot load waits in Birmingham, two hours away. A third broke down in Kansas, and you need a relay for his California delivery. ...