Optimization
Freight Intake
Accept the loads that maximize network profitability.
Freight Intake weighs every tender against the whole network — the capacity you have, the commitments you owe, and the demand still to come — and returns what taking it does to your profitability.
What happens without it
One cancellation changes what every other truck should do next.
A tender arrives, a load cancels, a truck breaks down, and the network is a different network. A CSR is expected to keep up with all of it — network balance, the commitments each customer is owed, what sales has asked them to do, the revenue on the load in front of them — while working dozens, sometimes hundreds of tenders at a time. And every decision they make lands on the person to their right or left. They are building one balanced network together, in silos.
The context that would settle it is not on the tender. Where they stand against the award. What the lane is paying on the market today. Whether this customer allows the load to be brokered. What their own brokerage would buy it for. Some of it sits in another system, and some of it sits in someone’s head.
What it does
Tender Acceptance brings that context onto the screen where the tender is actioned.
For each inbound tender:
| Recommendation | Expires↑ | Load | Shipper | Pickup | Delivery | Commitment | Contract | Network cost | Margin |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Reject | 22 min | 209988545 862 mi · dry van | Sweet Albattani Indianapolis, IN 46241 | 18 Aug · 00:00 IN-IND | 20 Aug · 00:00 Sanger, TX 76266 | 0 / 1 weekly 0% accepted | $2.91 | $3.31 to serve | −$0.40 per mile |
| Accept | 41 min | 209988612 311 mi · dry van | North Bay Supply Clarksville, TN 37040 | 18 Aug · 08:00 TN-CLK | 19 Aug · 06:00 Edwardsville, IL 62025 | 6 / 8 weekly 75% accepted | $3.42 | $2.88 to serve | +$0.54 per mile |
| Reject | 1 hr 06 min | 209988703 126 mi · dry van | Eager Cerf Plant City, FL 33566 | 18 Aug · 14:00 FL-TAM | 18 Aug · 22:00 Daytona Beach, FL 32117 | 2 / 2 weekly 100% accepted | $4.05 | $4.62 to serve | −$0.57 per mile |
| Accept | 1 hr 24 min | 209988719 194 mi · reefer | Youthful Burnell Daytona Beach, FL 32117 | 19 Aug · 06:00 FL-ORL | 19 Aug · 15:00 Savannah, GA 31408 | 1 / 4 weekly 25% accepted | $2.64 | $2.29 to serve | +$0.35 per mile |
| Accept | 2 hr 03 min | 209988744 467 mi · dry van | Gifted Allen Memphis, TN 38118 | 19 Aug · 07:00 TN-MEM | 20 Aug · 02:00 Oklahoma City, OK 73128 | 5 / 5 weekly 100% accepted | $3.18 | $2.71 to serve | +$0.47 per mile |
| Reject | 2 hr 47 min | 209988801 1,368 mi · dry van | Vigilant Hoover Laredo, TX 78045 | 19 Aug · 12:00 TX-LRD | 21 Aug · 18:00 Chicago, IL 60638 | 0 / 3 weekly 0% accepted | $3.76 | $4.11 to serve | −$0.35 per mile |
| Accept | 3 hr 12 min | 209988856 211 mi · dry van | Quirky Bardeen Columbus, OH 43217 | 20 Aug · 05:00 OH-CMH | 20 Aug · 15:00 Louisville, KY 40213 | 3 / 4 weekly 75% accepted | $2.87 | $2.44 to serve | +$0.43 per mile |
| Reject | 4 hr 05 min | 209988910 355 mi · reefer | Stoic Payne Ontario, CA 91761 | 20 Aug · 09:00 CA-ONT | 20 Aug · 21:00 Phoenix, AZ 85043 | 0 / 2 weekly 0% accepted | $3.05 | $3.52 to serve | −$0.47 per mile |
Where you stand against the award
The committed quantity, measured in the customer’s own week — each shipper starts theirs differently.
The contract rate next to the market
What the lane is paying today, beside what you agreed to. Read from whichever market source you already license — Freight Science does not sell you market data.
Whether the load can be brokered
Held as a rule at the customer, the award and the lane, and at the point where a commitment has been exceeded. Today that is knowledge held unevenly across the operation.
What your own brokerage is paying on that lane
Most often that buying behavior sits in the brokerage TMS or another database the person deciding does not have access to. Read directly from it, so asset versus non-asset is a number on the screen rather than a call to another building.
Commitments are the lever
In a market that favors carriers, the commitment is where the profit decision gets made.
Acceptance decisions have always been leveraged against committed lanes. What changes when you know exactly where you stand against a commitment is that you can aim at revenue and profit deliberately.
Where you stand comes from Commitment Management — what each award committed, and what it has delivered, week by week.
The mechanism
One tender, judged against the whole network.
The analysis never looks at a load on its own. It weighs every open tender against the capacity available, the demand already received, and the demand forecast to arrive — and returns the profitability of the network that results.
Because the network keeps moving, so does the answer: it re-solves across the whole network in seconds, every time something moves. The forecast that lets it price demand which has not arrived — tenders not yet received, forecast to customer, award, lane and pick-up date — is produced by the Operating Model rather than by this product, and more than one capability runs on it.
Not a black box
You have been priced by revenue management every time you booked a flight.
None of this is new mathematics. Every time you book a flight or a hotel room, something is deciding what that seat or that night is worth against everything else it could still sell. You interact with it constantly, and nobody ever tells you it is there.
Freight is the harder version, because the shelf is not fixed. An airline knows how many seats it has. The capacity you have on a lane changes with every load you have already accepted, and with wherever those loads leave your trucks. That is the part Freight Intake does — the same discipline, applied to a network that will not hold still.
The balance it is reasoning about is visible too. Balance Map holds all demand and all capacity in near-real time, which is where the shape behind a recommendation can be seen rather than taken on trust.
Freight that doesn’t fit
A CSR should turn freight down on purpose rather than let a tender expire.
Shippers score an expired tender as a service failure, so what costs you is not the load you decline — it is the tender nobody answers in time. How that gets handled is a business rule you configure, and there are two ways to run it:
Turn it down.
The rejection goes back through the TMS and EDI.
Turn it down, and offer it to the other divisions first.
Inside the expiration window the tender already carries, the load goes to the other divisions to evaluate. If nobody takes it, the rejection is sent programmatically before the tender times out.
Either way, the shipper has an answer before the tender times out.
It composes with your rules
You set where the automatic action stops and a person starts.
SID: SHP2608-N7QT418
North Bay Supply · Clarksville, TN → Edwardsville, IL
Order info
Equipment and assets
Feedback
Recommended Pickup Date: 8/18/26
Written by the system, not the planner. What do others need to know about this tender?
Revenue
Tender rate as a flat rate.
Revenue booked on a load the system recommended.
Stops
NORTH BAY CLARKSVILLE PLANT
1400 INDUSTRIAL PKWY, CLARKSVILLE, TN 37040, USA
MERIDIAN EDWARDSVILLE DC
600 LOGISTICS CT, EDWARDSVILLE, IL 62025, USA
Most companies pair the recommendation with Operating Rules — if the recommendation is accept, then accept — so the automation runs on the optimization rather than ahead of it. Where that line sits can be set per customer or per lane.
Freight Intake recommends which freight to take. Assignment decides who runs it.
“The Freight Science tool has allowed us to introduce a universal order acceptance process for all of our mode channels. That had not existed before we implemented Freight Science.”
Wes K.
VP of Operations · 800-truck dedicated and intermodal carrier