Balance Map
Out of balance, something gives — margin, a pickup, or a driver.
Balance Map holds all demand and all capacity in near-real time — what is available, what is planned, and where the network needs resolving. It updates every time a driver is assigned, a load cancels or a load is added. And it is where you can see the balance behind the recommendations Freight Intake is making.
Two directions
Where you will need freight, and where you are already oversold.
Two problems that look alike on a map and need opposite answers. One region will run short of freight for the trucks it has. Another is already oversold and needs capacity it does not own.
Chicago takes eleven more loads in than it sends out, so trucks arrive and wait. Dallas is short by six. The move between them is the repositioning that closes the gap.
What imbalance costs
Imbalance shows up in three places, and rarely in all of them at once.
Balance is critical to profitability, service and driver retention. Any one of the three can be the one that breaks.
Empty miles.
An unbalanced network runs more of them.
Drivers waiting.
A driver sits idle waiting for a load, or deadheads to the nearest one. Neither is what they were hired to do.
Service.
A pickup gets missed, or an appointment gets moved, because no driver was available or near enough to take it.
What it does to the plan
The obvious plan gets complicated.
An unbalanced network is harder to plan, and not at the margins. The moves that would have been obvious stop being obvious, and a planner is left working the complicated version of the same day.
That is separate from the cost. Empty miles and a missed pickup are what imbalance does to the P&L. This is what it does to the person doing the planning.
The network never holds still
It refreshes whenever anything material changes in the network.
A driver is assigned. A load cancels. A new load lands. Those are examples rather than the list — any material change to the network moves the balance, and the picture refreshes with it, across all demand and all capacity.
Which is what makes it the way to get planners and CSRs onto the same page about where the network is now and where it is heading. Every acceptance decision affects the person at the next desk, because a balanced network is built by planners and CSRs working the same problem — and until now, doing it in silos.
Where a recommendation comes from
This is where the recommendation stops being a black box.
Balance Map was built to make Freight Intake’s reasoning about balance visible. When the optimization says take this load and leave that one, the reason is the shape of the network — and this is the shape.
There is a compounding effect worth knowing about: the more the planners follow the recommendations, the better balanced the network gets, and the better the recommendations get to work with.
Commitment Management
Know exactly how your commitments are performing.
Commitment Management holds what each award committed — on both sides — and what has been delivered against it: the revenue realized against the revenue committed, and the lanes and loads underneath it.
Operating Rules can accept, reject or broker freight against commitments — by lane, by shipper, by day of week. And in Freight Intake, where you stand against the award is one of the four things on the Tender Acceptance screen.
What it holds
Drag your awarded lane volumes in, and the position maintains itself.
Redwood, MS → Murfreesboro, TN
Origin
Zip5.
Destination
One destination, seven zip codes.
Carrier level
Volume
Tenders to accept (annual). A backup lane carries a rate and no commitment.
Line haul rate
Allows brokerage
Tenders on this lane cannot be brokered.
Lanes on this award
→ Morristown, TN
→ Murfreesboro, TN
→ Newton, NC
→ Petersburg, VA
→ Richmond, VA
→ San Antonio, TX
→ Sealy, TX
→ Waxahachie, TX
→ Bowling Green, KY
→ Carrollton, TX
→ Charlotte, NC
For every award:
What was committed. The awarded lane volumes as they were awarded — loaded by drag and drop, rather than rebuilt in a spreadsheet.
Revenue realized against revenue committed. The realization that matters most is revenue, because revenue is what the company is built on.
The lanes and the loads. Load-level execution against the commitment. Lanes and loads are what the network is built on, and both are held here.
Measured in the customer's week. Each shipper starts their week differently, and a commitment measured on the wrong calendar is measured wrong.
The commitment in your TMS
A planner can record a commitment on a lane but has nothing that manages it.
A commitment usually exists as an attribute on a lane — present, but an afterthought, and the consequences of that land downstream. What no system was purpose-built to hold is the award itself: what was committed, what has been delivered against it, and what that leaves.
So the position gets assembled by hand, and the data behind it is inherently flawed. Discussing committed volumes, or service and on-time performance, a pricing team arrives with a position it cannot defend.
Both directions
A commitment has two sides, and the volume showing up is the less reliable one.
One direction points out. Retaining an award means proving your value to the shipper, and that takes a record of what you delivered that holds up in the room.
The other points in, and it is the one carriers are worst equipped for: knowing which committed volume is not coming. That is revenue you were counting on, and network predictability you planned around.
Commitments are a strategy
The fifteenth load on a lane you committed ten to is taking a better load’s truck.
| Lane | Awarded | Per week | One load every | Held weekly | Which implies |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
→ Petersburg, VA | 26 | 0.50 | 2.0 weeks | 1 | 52 a year |
→ Charlotte, NC | 25 | 0.48 | 2.1 weeks | 0 | no commitment |
→ Carrollton, TX | 19 | 0.37 | 2.7 weeks | 0 | no commitment |
→ Newton, NC | 17 | 0.33 | 3.1 weeks | 0 | no commitment |
→ Morristown, TN | 6 | 0.12 | 8.7 weeks | 0 | no commitment |
→ Richmond, VA | 5 | 0.10 | 10.4 weeks | 0 | no commitment |
→ San Antonio, TX | 4 | 0.08 | 13.0 weeks | 0 | no commitment |
→ Bowling Green, KY | 1 | 0.02 | 52 weeks | 0 | no commitment |
Eight primary lanes | 103 | 52 | |||
Commitments are a business strategy, not a compliance record. In a market that favors carriers, capacity spent past what you committed is capacity taken from something better.
Acceptance decisions have always been leveraged on committed lanes. Knowing exactly where you stand against commitments is what makes that deliberate — and lets you focus strategically on revenue and profit.
Performance Scorecard
A commitment is a two-way street.
Performance Scorecard measures both sides of a shipper relationship — your execution, and theirs. It exists to make the relationship mutually accountable, on numbers both parties can see.
What dwell costs you
Which locations cost you the most time, and what that time is worth.
Commitment
3 awards
Committed revenue
$65,980
59 commitments on 20 lanes
Recognized
$12,972
34 loads tendered
Revenue realization
20%
$12,972 of $65,980
Acceptance
32%
11 of 34 tendered
Average lead time
2 days
to pickup
Service
View late pickups
On-time pickup
91%
1 late of 11
On-time delivery
100%
0 late
Service failures
1
late pickup
Average dwell
3h 19m
mean of 5 facilities
Payment terms
30 days
net
Dwell by facility
View dwell
Palmetto, GA
Consignee
8h 06m
Elk Grove Village, IL
Shipper
2h 25m
Clarksville, TN
Consignee
2h 19m
Oklahoma City, OK
Consignee
2h 00m
Villa Rica, GA
Shipper
1h 43m
Dwell is held per location, measured from what actually happened rather than from what was scheduled. That turns it from an anecdote about a bad receiver into an expense attached to a lane.
It is the figure that makes the rest of the scorecard actionable — on your side it prices the cost of serving a facility, and on theirs it is the one thing they can most easily fix.
A commitment is to a book, not a lane
Carriers rarely manage an award like the book of business it is.
Shippers often do not appreciate that a commitment covers a whole book, not a single lane. A carrier builds a network around the award as a whole, so volume that does not materialize on committed lanes is not an isolated miss.
It carries a real cost and an opportunity cost at the same time — capacity held for freight that never came, and freight elsewhere that was turned away to hold it.
Every event, every leg
A detailed, auditable record of every event, for every leg, of every load and tender.
The scorecard is not a monthly summary assembled after the fact. It holds the event history underneath the number — every leg of every load, and every tender, including the ones you turned down.
That is what makes a service conversation possible: not a percentage either side can dispute, but the record it was calculated from.
What the shipper gets
The locations causing problems for every carrier that serves them — and their own tendering behavior.
A shipper rarely has a consolidated view of which of their own facilities are costing carriers time. The scorecard gives them one, along with their EDI tendering behavior.
Both are things they can act on, and both benefit every party on the lane. It is the reason this is a scorecard you can share rather than one you hold back for the negotiation.