By Jordan Kidd, Head of Product, Datatruck

Years ago a dispatch office ran on a pegboard with fifty cards hung on it, one card for every truck in the fleet. Somebody moved those cards around all day, and all any card told you was where the truck came from and where it was headed. Air traffic control ran similarly on paper strips until about ten minutes ago, historically speaking, and plenty of towers still do. A model of the world that works tends to outlive the technology it was built on by decades. Trucking is no different.

The pegboard never worked on its own. What kept the cards current was the pay phone. A driver running from Chicago to Atlanta could pull into a truck stop, call the office, and tell you he was sitting in Knoxville and would or would not make it on time. One update on a two day run, written down on the card in pencil. The pay phones are long gone, but somehow the industry still makes check calls to trucks that are already reporting their own position every minute.

Truck stops also had load boards, and I mean literal boards: TV screens listing freight the way an airport lists departures. Chicago to Atlanta, tomorrow, fifteen hundred dollars, call this number, with the pay phones bolted to the wall right beside it. That wall, with the board above it and the phones below it, is about where the digital footprint of this industry starts.

Out of all of that somebody built the first transportation management systems, and they were built to do two jobs. A customer calls asking where his freight is, and whoever picks up the phone has to find the answer without walking down the hall to ask three other people who might also not know. Then at the end of the run the thing has to bill the customer correctly and pay the driver correctly, down to the mile and the accessorial. That was the whole assignment, and for about thirty years it was plenty.

In 2017, the industry changed. The US government passed the ELD mandate, which made nearly every carrier put an electronic logging device in every truck, and the assumption every system since the pegboard was built on stopped being true. For as long as anybody could remember, the hard part was getting the information at all: somebody had to call, ask, and write it down. After the mandate, the information showed up whether you asked for it or not. The device ties a driver to a truck the moment he logs in, then reports position, odometer and duty status every minute or so. Everything a dispatcher used to pry loose one phone call at a time now shows up on its own, from every truck in the yard and every truck on the road.

What happened next  got us halfway. The ELD integrated into the TMS, and then the TMS integrated into the shipper’s and broker’s tracking tools. On a good day, status comes in one side, goes out the other and no person touches it in the middle. The first job we built the TMS to do – tell us where our freight is – is now mostly machines talking to each other.

The second job never got the same treatment. Billing and pay still run on documents. The proof that a load was picked up and delivered is a signed document, not a GPS ping, and at a lot of docks it is still handwritten. Somebody still matches the rate confirmation to the POD to the detention clock to the lumper receipt, and every one they miss is money the carrier earned and never collected. That is the job where a mistake costs real dollars, and it is the one most systems still hand back to a person.

Most systems in this market never changed jobs, and they remain very good repositories that will tell you accurately and instantly what load truck 12 is on right now. In 1995 that was a hard question and somebody deserved to get paid for answering it. Answering a solved question faster than the last guy did is not worth much money in 2026.

Here is what I would put in front of any owner deciding where to spend. Freight is a commodity. Your alpha lies in your decisions, how good they are, and how fast you make them.

Trucking companies are not profitable by default. The well run carriers average somewhere around 97% Operating Ratio over any five year stretch. Last year the average truckload van or reefer carrier was over 99%. Cost per mile hit a record, contract rates only just got back to where they were in 2022, and carriers have been cutting office staff by hand because the math forces it. Get one assumption wrong in the cost model, and that margin is gone before anybody in the office notices it.

You are already paying for the data that would make those decisions better, and in my experience most owners never extract value from these data streams.

Every truck and every driver you run is reporting position, duty status and odometer readings right now, while you sit here reading this. The catch is that interpreting it well takes a lot of industry knowledge. You have to know which duty status affects which load, where one load’s deadhead ends and the next one begins, and when the detention clock actually started as opposed to when somebody wrote it down.

So what should we be doing differently? Rate per mile became the industry’s number because miles were all the old world could measure. The rate con gave you the pay, the mileage guide gave you the distance, and that was everything the pegboard knew. It is mostly a vanity number.

A short load pays great per mile and eats the whole day, and a load that sat six hours at the dock looks fine per mile and was a disaster. Data-first software can see what the pegboard never could, which is time. A driver does not run out of miles, he runs out of hours. So the number that matters is rate per hour, meaning what the load paid divided by every hour it took, from the moment he started rolling toward the pickup to the moment he was empty again, dock time included.

Until recently you could not get these numbers without a clerk, two exports and a long afternoon, because the hours lived in the ELD and the revenue lived in the TMS and nothing joined them. A modern TMS does. Before you book the next load, pull the fourteen day rolling rate per hour for that specific driver, then ask whether the load in front of you raises that number or lowers it. That is a different question from whether the load pays well. A load can pay fine and still pull a driver’s number down, and you will not feel it until the month closes.

Then ask the harder one, which is about where the load leaves you rather than what it pays. If I send this driver into this market with the hours he has left and the home time he is owed and a trailer type that half the freight down there will not take, can I get him back out, and what is the return rate out of there this week? A dispatcher makes that call dozens of times a day, usually in under a minute and usually on instinct. I want to be fair to dispatchers here, because instinct built over fifteen years of doing this is good and often beats the spreadsheet. Instinct with a fourteen day average sitting next to it is better.

None of this requires anybody to buy a new category of software, and this industry does not need another one. The pegboard never actually left. We photographed it, put it on a screen, added color coding and a search bar and a filter for trailer type, and called the project finished.

A screen showing you where every truck is right now is the pegboard at higher resolution. What I want out of a system over the next five years is not a tidier place to keep the answers I already had, and not a faster way to ask questions either. I want it doing the routine work itself: reading the paperwork, building the invoice, chasing the missing POD, and I want it watching everything else so it can tell me something is wrong before I think to ask. Which driver is quietly running below cost this month. Which lane lost its backhaul three weeks ago and nobody said anything about it. Which truck is sitting at a dock right now, past the point where detention should be billing, while there is still time to do something about it. Where a wrong move costs real money, like booking above my rate or releasing a driver’s pay, I want it to ask me first. The screen I open in the morning should be the short list of things it could not finish, not fifty cards I have to read to find the three that matter.

Go answer one of those this week, by hand, so you know what to expect your system to do for you every day. Pull the fourteen day rolling rate per hour on every driver you run, sort the list low to high, and go look at the bottom five names on it. I would bet you find at least one name down there you would have sworn was doing fine, and at least one who is near the top of your rate per mile list.