The foundation
Freight Science is the operating and orchestration layer for freight — connecting the systems that run the business and directing the decisions that span them.
The Operating Model
It is a data transformation and a codification of knowledge. The transformation makes the data your systems already produce usable. The codification writes down what they never held — your rules, what each customer requires, how your locations behave, what your drivers will accept and when they work. Every decision above it runs on both.
The gap
A planner has never been asked to write down what they know.
| Load | Stop | Appointment | Projected | Gap | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
5195919 Distribution DC · Groveport, OH | Live unload Groveport, OH | 7 Aug · 11:15 | 7 Aug · 14:21 | +3h 06m | Dwell at previous stop ran 2h over its median for a Monday. |
5197813 Grocery DC · Memphis, TN | Live load Memphis, TN | 7 Aug · 13:00 | 8 Aug · 02:32 | +13h 32m | Driver hits a 10-hour break before the window opens. |
5195602 Retail DC · Inwood, WV | Live unload Inwood, WV | 7 Aug · 13:30 | 7 Aug · 13:59 | +29m | Inside the receiver's observed tolerance on this lane. |
The math has been available for decades, and every optimization vendor in freight is selling a version of it. What none of them can supply is the input.
They assume the layer underneath is already there — that the data is clean, the codes line up, and the rules are written down somewhere. It rarely is. Half of what a good decision needs comes in from somebody else in their format, and the other half is in somebody’s head.
Run optimization on top of that and you get a plan a dispatcher does not believe. Hand a planner one bad answer and they will not take the next one.
Transformation
A CSR fixes the same field by hand on every tender from that customer.
Tender in
Restated in your conventions
Rate the
tender
Tested against
Auto-accept
tender confirmedReject
returned over EDIHold it inside
the expiration window — canceled before it times outA division or affiliate
offered it firstAnother company’s capacity
waterfalled against what is openYour own assets
through the optimizationBrokerage
only below your margin thresholdWritten back to the TMS and over EDI
Every path writes back — accepted, rejected, or moved. Whoever subscribed to the rule is told in email or your chat tool.A commodity code comes in wrong. A customer code means one thing in your system and something else in theirs. The receiving SCAC is the same mistake every week. So somebody fixes it, load after load, and nobody writes down what the fix was.
That fix is knowledge. Written into the Operating Model it happens once and stays done.
Underneath that there is the EDI itself. Every trading partner speaks a slightly different dialect of the same standard (one customer sends a segment another leaves out, and the same field can mean two different things depending on who sent it). You do not finish that work and then begin — it keeps going as partners change, and holding it is part of what the Operating Model is for.
Codification
Your operation runs on knowledge no system has a field for.
Four kinds of it, and every one is somebody’s job to remember today.
You decided most of this years ago and never wrote it down.
Which lanes can go to the brokerage and which are white-glove. What margin a load has to clear before the brokerage sees it. Which loads are never allowed to leave the asset. How the revenue splits when one division’s tractor runs another division’s freight. Somebody knows every one of those answers. Ask two people and you may get two answers, and that is the actual problem.
Your best CSR is the reason that account runs smoothly.
They know when that customer’s week starts, which documents they need and when, what they will forgive on a late delivery and what they will not, and which of their locations behaves nothing like the other twelve. Most CSRs write a version of it down for whoever covers the weekend or the night shift, and it works. What it does not survive is that person taking another job.
The same receiver that takes you at nine will turn you away at four.
And a live unload is a different appointment than dropping a preloaded trailer and leaving. Sixty customers can ship through one location, and the location has its own behavior underneath all of them — how early it will take a truck, how late it will still work one, and how long the run really takes at that hour.
Drivers › Driver 1057
Driver 1057
Weekly revenue
Measured against the minimum earnings goal on this record.
On-time service
Rolling, by appointment kept.
Pickup 100%
Delivery 94%
Missed 2 of 71
Core information
Equipment
Finances
The minimum earnings goal is used to measure weekly revenue against a target.
Schedule
Without a home time frequency the driver is assumed to be available 24/7.
Location preferences
Location preferences are used to help align Planning recommendations to the right driver. Drivers with avoided locations will not receive recommendations taking them in or out of the area.
What that removes
The consequence of the two rows above, applied to this week's board.
Your drivers each have a list of things they will not do.
Where they will go and where they will not. How often they get home, and on which day. What they will not haul. Whether they will take a same-day reload. What the equipment on their tractor can actually do.
And the schedule. Which days a driver works, and which shift, is often not held anywhere useful in a TMS — the field either does not exist or it holds something nobody has touched in a year. Build a plan without it and you have put a load on a driver who was never going to be there. Somebody rebuilds it at six in the morning.
Onboarding
Carriers often do not know these gaps exist until we start looking.
The rules exist. The requirements exist. The way each location behaves exists. None of it is written down, and nobody has ever had to look at the whole set at once — so what surprises people is the size of it. How many calls a day are being made against a default nobody chose.
Some of the answers can only come from you. Which lanes can be brokered, how revenue splits between divisions, what a location will really tolerate — those are your decisions and no vendor should be making them. Finding the questions is ours. So is knowing which of them are costing you the most.
That is what onboarding is here. We standardize the data, we sit with the people who hold the rules and write them down, and we start with the smallest place that moves the most. We have done it before.
Where the optimizing happens
Freight Intake and Assignment both read from this layer.
They are the optimization, and this is what they run on. We built this layer first and treat it as the product, because every other capability depends on it. A recommendation is only as good as the truth underneath it.
What the Operating Model itself does not do is make the call. It puts what the operation knows in front of the CSR answering the tender and the planner choosing the driver, and the decision stays theirs. It does not replace your TMS either — planners and dispatchers keep working where they work, and the TMS stays the system of record.
A load moved by one company’s driver and executed in another company’s TMS resolves to a single record.