Automation for Dedicated Fleets
Service, differentiated.
Service is what you sell. What it costs to deliver is where you win.
A dedicated fleet is judged on whether every scheduled stop gets covered. Freight Science builds the orders, ranks the drivers, and plans across every fleet you run — so the same service comes out of fewer unused hours and fewer empty miles.
Why dedicated got competitive
One-way capacity became dedicated capacity.
When the market turned, a lot of one-way capacity decided it was done with one-way. Those carriers came into dedicated, and dedicated got more competitive — not because the freight changed, but because the number of people bidding on it did.
Service is still what the account is sold on, and it is still where the difference is. That difference is not a promise about on-time percentage. It is what the operation costs to run at that service level, and whether you can show it.
Two things move it. How much work comes out of the drivers, tractors and trailers already committed to the account. And how much of the empty side of the network gets covered — out of your own freight where it exists, and out of third-party freight where it does not.
Both take cost out. You keep some of it and the shipper sees some of it, which is what makes the next bid easier to win.
“Freight Science also enables us to drive more backhauls, allowing us to do more with less.”
Jared S.
Chief Commercial Officer · 800-truck dedicated and intermodal carrier
Utilization
A committed truck can still do more work than it does.
08/08 · SAT
08/09 · SUN
08/10 · MON
08/11 · TUE
Driver 1058
TERWIJ · 17586
5195435
Smyrna, TN → Inwood, WV
5197544
Inwood, WV → Vandalia, OH
Driver 1059
LOVTAN · 21260
5197287
Houston, TX → Houma, LA
5195869
Joliet, IL → Edwardsville, IL
Driver 1060
CUDUMO · 21465
5199507
Inwood, WV → Vandalia, OH · started
5197113
Beech Island, SC → Villa Rica, GA
Driver 1061
JAMHAR · 21289
5195602
Pearl, MS → LaGrange, GA
5195919
LaGrange, GA → Groveport, OH
Dedicated capacity is fixed by contract. How many of the available hours get used is not, and it is decided one assignment at a time — against hours, home time, equipment and the appointment together rather than in sequence.
There is also slack nobody has measured. Fleets hold capacity back on purpose so a late order from the customer can still be covered, and that is the right instinct — it protects the service. Held blind, though, the reserve gets sized against the worst day instead of the day in front of it.
The reserve is held at the fleet level because the fleet level is where it is measured. Four fleets each protecting themselves against their own worst day hold four reserves, and nobody sees the total.
Trailers are part of it. A dedicated account runs a pool of them, and equipment is one of the constraints the assignment is solved against rather than a separate exercise.
The smaller version of the same thing runs all day: a driver with hours left and no next load.
Empty miles
Your best backhaul may already be within your network.
×3 2 corridors
×2 11 corridors
A dedicated lane that runs loaded out and empty back is the most expensive thing on the account. There are two places the return leg can come from: somewhere else in your own network, or from outside it.
The return leg is usually not another dedicated account. It is a regional or over-the-road load sitting in a different division — a different board, a different planner, a different P&L, and no shared view between them. The empty truck and the freight exist in the same market at the same time, and neither side can see the other.
That is not a routing problem. The dedicated planner’s screen was built to show the dedicated account, the regional board was built to show regional freight, and both were built correctly. The opportunity lives in the gap between them.
The obstacle after that is rarely the math. It is that the assets sit on somebody’s P&L, and a truck going to work for another division reads as a loss on the division that gave it up.
Where your own network has nothing for the return leg, Freight Science brings third-party freight to it. The move stays on your truck and your authority.
Order creation
What is not in the TMS is not on the invoice.
Every move on the account has to exist in the TMS before anything else can happen — execution, status, or a bill.
The moves that reliably get keyed are the ones that look like freight. The ones that often do not are empty repositioning, trailer moves and spotting — and on a dedicated contract those are frequently billable. Work that was performed, that the customer agreed to pay for, and that nobody invoiced, because the order was never built.
The keying goes too. Master templates carry the repetitive lanes, inbound EDI tenders accept against rules you set, and an emailed load request builds the order in the TMS directly.
The TMS stays the system that executes and invoices. It stops depending on somebody remembering to write the move down.
Service
A late delivery on dedicated puts you in front of the customer who bought the fleet.
A missed appointment on dedicated is not a number in a report. It is a conversation with the customer who bought the fleet.
What moves it is planning backwards from the delivery deadline instead of forwards from a mileage estimate — real dwell by site and hour, the transit the lane runs, and the window the receiver will honor.
Consistency
Whoever follows your dedicated planner should be able to run the account on the same information.
The person on your dedicated account has built something real with that customer and those drivers, and no system replaces it. That is not what should be transferable.
The execution is. They should be able to take a day off. And when they move into a bigger role, whoever follows them should be able to run the account the same way on the same information — not spend six months rebuilding what the last person knew about which receiver will not touch a trailer after two.
This matters more than it did. Seats cannot be replaced quickly, so an account that depends on one person’s recollection is exposed in a way it was not two years ago.
The rules the fleet has to follow, the unwritten ones it really runs on, and what an individual planner knows all get codified, so the account stops depending on recollection.
“When it comes to planning and how we have historically done it, there is a lot of tribal knowledge and if we need to cover for someone who is out on PTO or for whatever reason, there can be a lot of disruption to drivers, the customer, revenue, and KPIs.”
“With Freight Science, you can essentially have anyone jump into a business that is being planned optimally and everything will run as it always has. It takes out a lot of the human error, and that’s a huge deal.”
Matt C.
Director of Operations · 800-truck OTR and dedicated carrier
Across divisions and systems
Fleets do not have to be on one system to be planned together.
A dedicated operation of any size runs more than one fleet, and often more than one system. Different divisions, different boards, different planners, and underneath it in some cases a different TMS.
The Operating Model spans them. It reads the systems you already run and holds one model of the network across all of them, so a planner on one fleet can see the truck and the freight sitting on another. Nothing is migrated and nothing is replaced.
The planning is where the synergy is. Planning across accounts rather than one account at a time is the harder problem, and it is the one the backhauls come out of: two fleets that can see each other cover each other’s return legs, and two fleets that cannot each hold their own reserve.