Freight Science

The Operating Model for truckload carriers.

Freight Science is the operating and orchestration layer for freight — connecting the systems that run the business and directing the decisions that span them.

Two things make truckload expensive to grow: operations grows with the fleet, and the decisions that set the margin are past what a person can hold in their head. Neither is new. The math for the second has been available for decades; what no carrier had was a true record of its own operation to run it on. We hold that record — on the TMS you already have, with nothing migrated and nothing replaced.

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Truckload carriers running Freight Science

What growth costs

Every tractor you add comes with more work for operations.

More trucks and more drivers mean more loads, and more loads mean more appointment changes, more status updates, more paperwork and more decisions per shift. So operations grows with the fleet. Operations headcount per tractor does not improve, and the margin on the hundredth truck looks like the margin on the tenth.

None of that work needs judgment. A CSR changes appointment times and updates the load as it moves. A driver manager checks ETAs and PTAs by hand. Somebody keeps a spreadsheet current so the desk can see where the network is out of balance.

100

tractors

Operations grows with the fleet.

Operations queue

Illustrative

Every row is a person touching a load. None of it needs judgment.

The two decisions

A carrier is solving two optimization problems at once.

They are worked by different people, on different data, and each one moves the other.

Every CSR is competing for the same capacity without knowing it.

Which freight to take, at what price, and what to hold capacity back for. It is worked here by CSRs and account managers — at some carriers both, side by side. Every yes consumes a truck that another load might have used better, and nobody at the desk can see the whole board. A CSR is measured on covering the freight rather than on what that truck could have earned. (We call this one Freight Intake.)

A planner matches drivers to loads one comparison at a time.

Which driver runs which load, against that driver’s hours, their home time, what they will and will not haul, the equipment on the tractor, and what the receiver at the other end actually tolerates. Every option is computable and no person can hold them all, so a planner works the board one load at a time and runs the same comparison until the shift ends. (We call this one Assignment.)

Neither one stands still while you solve the other.

Which freight you take changes who is available to run it. Who is available changes which freight you should take. A carrier is solving both, in both directions, all day. That coupling is what makes this hard, and it is why solving one of them well is not the same as solving the operation.

What happens next

Carriers who can see their whole network are the ones doing the consolidating.

Before 1980 this was a regulated industry of large carriers running on granted authority. Deregulation rebuilt it from the ground up into a fragmented field of owner-operators and small fleets, and the structure has barely changed since — even the largest carriers control only a small share of capacity.

That is starting to turn over. Every regulatory step since the ELD mandate has raised the cost of compliance and the consequences of getting a decision wrong, and each one rewards scale, data and sophistication. The operators who can see the whole network they are running in, rather than the slice their own systems show them, are the ones with room to grow into it.

How the market consolidates →

Why now

Carriers had a data problem disguised as a math problem.

What happened to a truck — where it was, when it got there, how long the stop took — lived on a paper log and in a driver’s memory. The math had been available for decades. It had nothing true to run on.

That changed in December 2019, when the last exemption ended and every truck subject to the rule had to run an electronic logging device. For the first time the industry had a continuous, timestamped record of what actually happened rather than what somebody wrote down afterward. That is the year we started.

An ELD tells you where a truck was and when. It does not tell you what a receiver tolerates, what a specific driver will accept, or what a customer requires. That is the rest of the operating truth, and capturing it is what this platform does.

Driver 1042 · Tuesday afternoon

Can this driver make an 18:30 pickup?

3h 05m

6h 00m

1h 50m

Drive to receiver

110 mi

3h 05m

observed on this lane at this hour

Live unload

Receiver · Charlotte, NC

6h 00m

observed median at this location

Drive to next pickup

40 mi

1h 50m

observed

Arrives 22:55 — misses the pickup by 4h 25m.

Illustrative

The TMS plans on defaults — 55 mph on the highway, 25 in town, two hours for a live unload. At some locations two hours is six. A planner working from the defaults finds out when the driver calls.

How the Operating Model works →

The shift

A carrier changes how it operates, not which systems it runs.

Decisions made on what was captured rather than on what somebody remembers. Workflows that do not need a person because they never needed judgment. The same TMS, the same telematics, the same ELD, and a different operating model on top of them.

That is a change in how the operation runs, not a migration. Your systems keep their working screens and stay the system of record.

Your people

Your operations team spends the day on driver and customer relationships instead.

We are not here to replace CSRs, planners or account managers. Same desks, same people. What changes is where the hours go — the driver who needs a call, the customer who needs an answer, the account that has not been touched in a month, and the service that keeps it next year.

The platform

Freight Science optimizes and automates the work from tender to delivery.

Four groups, à la carte on a required foundation:

Visibility

Balance Map · Commitment Management · Performance Scorecard

Visibility across the entire network. What each award committed and what it delivered. Both sides of the customer relationship.

Automation

Load Building · Operating Rules · Tours & Driver Bids

Work that requires no judgment should not require a person. Every action follows a rule you set, and you can see which rule fired.

Optimization

Freight Intake · Assignment

Freight Intake recommends which freight to take. Assignment recommends who runs it. When the day breaks the plan, the planner gets the next option without asking for it.

Extend

Self-Dispatch

An independent contractor got into this business for freedom and choice. The carrier that gives them both is the one they stay with, and the one the next one signs with.

Every fleet type

Every fleet runs the same network math against a different objective.

What each fleet is solving for is what changes.

For-hire and OTR

Building scalable truckload operations.

Which freight to take, and who runs it. The objective is revenue per hour.

Learn more →

Dedicated

Service, differentiated.

Every scheduled stop gets a truck, with the drivers and equipment the shipper bought. Cost is the constraint, not the goal.

Learn more →

Private fleets

Freight Science runs on the systems you already have.

We capture from your TMS, telematics and ELD. We write status and documents back to the system that owns the load, so that system stays correct. The TMS keeps its working UI and stays the system of record.

If we stopped tomorrow, the operation would not stop. It would revert to manual.

“The platform provides us with readily available metrics to monitor the health of our network balance, customer commitments, customer PTA’s and on-time service. The gains our company has seen in recent years, would not have been possible without the benefits of our partnership with Freight Science.”

Blair E.

Senior Vice President, Truckload · 2,000-truck truckload carrier

Integrations →

The network

Every load you take moves the rest of the network.

Illustrative

Find the highest-impact place to start.

Forty-five minutes. We learn your operation. If there is a fit, we show you where it moves.

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