Freight is a promise made before the capacity exists. Sales quotes a lane, operations finds the truck, and the gap between those two moments is where margin and customers go missing.
At most carriers, brokers and 3PLs, the commercial system and the operational system have never been introduced. Sales works a lane in a CRM or a spreadsheet; planning, dispatch and settlement happen in a TMS the commercial team cannot see into. So quotes go out against capacity that is already spoken for, a customer asking where their freight is gets three different answers, and nobody can say which lanes and which customers actually made money.
We join the commercial view to the operational one. The customer, the lane, the quote and the load sit against one account, the TMS keeps running the operation, and the people selling can finally see what they are selling.
We do not start with software. We start with the path a load takes from quote to settlement, and we close the handoffs where margin and goodwill leak out.
Beyond phase one
Drawn from real delivery work in freight and rail. None of it was requested up front.
Committed, available and currently being quoted should be one answer rather than three. Where sales cannot see what operations has already given away, the same truck gets sold twice and somebody spends Friday afternoon unpicking it.
Most quoting starts from a rate sheet and a memory. Keep what you quoted on a lane, what you won it at and what it actually cost to run, and the next quote starts from evidence instead of from whoever happens to be pricing it that morning.
These land in an inbox, get argued about once, and then disappear. Attach them to the account and the quarterly review runs off what actually happened on the freight rather than off what survived into the invoice.
One railroad we worked with moved their entire commodity code library into Salesforce as products. A deal stopped being a paragraph in a Word document and became structured data you can price, forecast and report on by commodity.
The gap between sold and entered is where orders go to die, and it is usually a person retyping. Close the gap and the commercial team can answer where the freight is without calling dispatch, which is most of what dispatch spends its day on.
Your TMS, your telematics and your settlement system run the operation. Here is the work at each boundary.
Booking, planning, dispatch and settlement, reconciled with the customer and the lane.
McLeod Software Trimble MercuryGate
Hours of service, location and safety, and the service event a customer is about to ask about.
Samsara Motive Geotab
What is on the floor, what is picked and what has already been promised to somebody else.
Manhattan Associates Körber NetSuite WMS
Rates, tracking and the arrival time the customer actually sees.
project44 FourKites Descartes
Invoicing, carrier pay and the margin number finance will stand behind.
NetSuite Sage Intacct Revenue Cloud (CPQ)
Claims, detention and escalations in one queue instead of three inboxes.
Service Cloud Salesforce Field Service Zendesk
We will trace it from the quote through the load to the settlement and show you where the margin went. Sometimes it is the rate. More often it is the accessorials nobody billed.
