Over the last few months we have run more than thirty interviews with carriers, brokerages, and the consultants who audit them. We went in expecting to hear that freight software is bad. That is not what we heard.
Almost everyone we spoke to likes at least one of their systems. The TMS does what a TMS does. The accounting package closes the month. The load board finds freight. Asked to name the worst piece of software they run, most operators had to stop and think about it.
Nobody could answer the simplest question
So we asked a different one. Where did last week's hours go? Not the driving hours — those are measured to the minute. The office hours. How many went to entering the same load twice, chasing a POD, rekeying a rate confirmation, refreshing a portal that notifies nobody.
Nobody could answer. Not the owners, not the operations managers, and not the consultants who bill by the day to answer exactly that class of question. The most common response was a number offered as a guess, followed immediately by an admission that it was a guess.
Fleets put telematics on every truck twenty years ago. The office still runs on memory.
The software is fine. The seams are not.
When we finally got to the real complaint, it was never about a single system. It was about what happens in the gaps between them.
- A rate confirmation arrives by email, gets read by a person, and gets typed into the TMS by hand.
- A POD arrives as a photo on a phone, gets renamed, gets uploaded to a portal that rejects it, and gets emailed instead.
- An accessorial gets mentioned on a phone call, gets written on a sticky note, and never reaches the invoice.
- A customer asks for a status that three different systems each hold one third of.
None of that is a software defect. Every one of those systems is doing the job it was bought to do. The work that falls between them is still real work, it is expensive, and it appears in no report anyone runs.
That is also why the usual fix does not land. Buying a better TMS does not remove the seam between the TMS and the customer portal. It moves it.
What we are doing about it
We are building the measurement that is missing. Not another system to log into — an observation layer that watches how the work actually happens across whatever you already run, and reports where the hours and the software dollars actually go.
We are early. We are onboarding our first design partners now, and we would rather say that plainly than imply otherwise.