The tool a broker sits in front of while they're on the phone

The problem

The knowledge that makes a broker good at their job wasn't written down anywhere a second person could use it. Which carriers were reliable on this lane, which ones had gone quiet, which ones were even legally cleared to run, all of it lived in spreadsheets and in individual reps' heads. Nothing stopped an unvetted carrier from getting sourced onto a load under time pressure, because there was no gate, just a policy someone was supposed to remember. Follow-ups had no set schedule, so a carrier developed months ago and never called again just stayed developed and forgotten, even after a new load came in on exactly their lane. And matching a load to a truck meant scrolling a load board and checking it against a separate spreadsheet by hand, for every single load.

What we built

We built carrier development as a series of stages with a real gate in it: Prospect through Onboarding to Approved, with a DAT-style qualification checklist, and only Approved carriers can be sourced onto a load. The system enforces that rather than leaving it to memory. Adding a carrier checks its MC number against Highway before the record is even created (for now that check is simulated, until access to Highway's data is in place), and a duplicate MC number links to the existing carrier instead of creating a second one. A follow-up board splits into Overdue, Due today and Upcoming, driven by a written schedule, so a carrier goes quiet on the system's schedule, not by accident. A single 0-100 reliability score, tiered A through D and weighted across on-time delivery, claim-free rate, load-acceptance rate, responsiveness and tenure, answers the question that kept coming up, which is how to judge a good truck. That score feeds a load-matching search. Describe the lane that needs covering and it ranks every qualified carrier by fit, deadhead miles, lane history, temperature capability and equipment, plotted on a real lane map, with a TMS load board above the search so clicking a load fills the search in for you. Each carrier's own page is built around the phone call rather than around how the data is stored: a strip of key numbers stays visible while a rep switches between contacts, lanes, performance, compliance, documents, claims and history. Behind that sit claims and recovery tracking, CSV import and export that catches duplicates by MC number, reports for the broker leaderboard and funnel, an admin center with sign-in through Microsoft Entra, and a city and lane search covering roughly 32,000 US cities, built from public data that comes with the system rather than a mapping service that charges per lookup.

The outcome

The system turns what a broker knows into something the whole desk can act on. A carrier developed months ago comes back up the moment a new load matches their lane, instead of staying forgotten in a rep's memory. Approved status is a gate the system enforces, so an unvetted carrier can't be sourced onto a load no matter how much pressure the desk is under. And instead of scrolling a board and checking it against a spreadsheet, a rep describes the lane once and gets a ranked list of who to call, with the reasons for the ranking attached. It's a working prototype today. The data is saved for real and every screen sits behind real Microsoft Entra sign-in, but the connections to Highway, the TMS and Teams are simulated for now, pending access and a cost review. That's the main gap left before it can be rolled out for everyday use.