Your “Full Integration” That Does Nothing | Episode 335

“Integrated” freight software isn’t always as seamless as it sounds. We break down where TMS integrations fall short—and how those gaps can lead to stolen loads, compliance misses, or hidden service issues.

We cover what to ask about carrier vetting tools, why timing and visibility matter, and how terms like API vs. webhook impact real-time data. Bottom line: messy data doesn’t get fixed by better tech or AI—it just scales the problem.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:19

All right, guys, we have a great episode for you today. We're talking software, people, integrations, what they can do, maybe where they fall short, how to best piece them all together. That was uh it was a really good one. And make sure you listen all the way to the end where we get to the AI point or the AI portion towards the end of it and kind of bring it all together. But Ben, um, what's in store for everyone today on this episode?

SPEAKER_01 0:45

I mean, we did a really good dive into integrations, but I I don't even think integrations is like the right way to define it because we kind of explained like where you need to overlay people and training to make sure you're protected in the way the software you pay for is, right? Everyone's paying for some type of carrier vetting and onboarding tools, but they don't necessarily talk to your TMS the way some of them, some people think they do. And also, if you're training your employees to just live in your TMS, you want to make sure that the other tool you're paying for is getting that information to where the people are using it, which I think is often overlooked until you have a load stolen. And then all of a sudden everybody finds this out. Like, I had no idea that this system didn't talk to this system or in this way at all. How do we end up with another load stolen? We're paying thousands of dollars for all these tools and they don't even talk to each other. So, like these are really good questions to ask when you're either evaluating a new one, but even in existing brokerage that might have not had an issue in the past couple of years, you should probably bookmark some time to go through your stuff to see if it is actually doing what you think it is.

Library Tips And Sponsor Mention

Sports Recap And Brackets Talk

SPEAKER_00 1:52

Yep. And obviously, we've got our good quick sports recap and some good news talking about headlines with CDLs and all the stuff that's coming. So um without further ado, let's hop into it. All right, Ben, let's get into it here. So uh if you guys are brand new, make sure to check out all of the other content. You've got the searchable library on our on our website. If you want to look up prospecting stuff, just type in prospect. If you want to look up operations or insurance-related stuff, just type those keywords in. You'll be able to get whatever you want to consume. Share us with your friends, leave us that review. We got some good uh some good YouTube comments. Somebody actually called me out and said I I say too many ums and uh like uhs and whatever for being a guy in the military. And I was just like, yeah, you're right. I gotta work on that. Thank you. I actually had a boss at the first program I worked at that said we had a sales meeting, and he goes, if any one of you can talk for a minute straight without saying um or write or uh, I'll let you guys leave early for the day. And I did it, but it was like really difficult trying to like focus on not having filler words, but we got to leave early that day. So funny stuff. Um, also, this episode is brought to you by Ascend TMS. It is the recommended TMS from Free360, especially for your small to medium-sized brokerages. You get all the the cool tech and tools and bells and whistles without the inflated price of a McLeod or something like that. So check it out for free. 90 days, no credit card needed. Just use the referral code in the show notes and you'll get access to that. But Ben, how's that? I mean, we're we're approaching springtime here now. How are we feeling?

SPEAKER_01 3:37

Dude, and it got super cold this week. Like literally the new.

SPEAKER_00 3:41

We got snow again in Buffalo.

SPEAKER_01 3:43

It's like crazy. I'm like, I was yesterday, yesterday morning. I was in my garage, like in my gym working out, and I'm like an hour into it. I'm like, why is it why am I cold? I'm like, I'm just like in the middle of my work, and I'm like, it just got really cold in here. And I'm like, I didn't realize I looked at the tempo, I'm like, it dropped to like 60 degrees, like an hour after, like, it wasn't that cold. I don't even think when I woke up yesterday morning, but yeah, yeah, it's freezing yesterday.

SPEAKER_00 4:07

Sports, you probably didn't watch this, but I caught it last night. The uh World Baseball Classic. I don't know if you did you see that at all? Some of it kind of like I didn't know if it's a news this year or what, but it was basically like an Olympics version of just baseball. So, like every country, it was Venezuela beat the U.S. last night three to two. Um, it was they were down two zero. I think Bryce Harper had a two-run banger in the eighth, and then Venezuela came back in the ninth and and took the lead. But I had no idea what was even going on until last year.

SPEAKER_01 4:40

But I also saw on Sports Center this morning, like the whole US team, it basically had in one bracket one for 28. Bryce Harper, two for four.

SPEAKER_00 4:49

Like for last night's game.

SPEAKER_01 4:51

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 4:52

Oh, well, that checks out. I mean, yeah, it was I I didn't tune in until like the seventh inning. Someone texted me because I was watching the Sabres game, it was uh at least the beginning of it. They they played on out in the in I think yeah, Vegas. Um, and I was texting about that before going to bed, and dude's like, You gotta check out U Team USA, and I was like, What? And I looked it up. I didn't even know 2-0 in the eighth inning, and I'm like, this is the championship game, and our team can't even get a run. There you go, one for 28 for the rest of the roster and then two for four.

SPEAKER_01 5:22

The Miami Open just started this week, started yesterday. It was on TV this morning. When is the Masters? That's gotta be uh it's no, it's always around Father's Day. Isn't it always on Father's Day weekend? What what what am I thinking about?

SPEAKER_00 5:36

What's in March? Is there not a March big golf tournament? Um, the Masters is usually an eight. It's usually a lot of things. The players was on last weekend. It was last weekend? Yeah. Oh wow, okay. Well, that's a big one for us in this. We're getting mad on our sports. Um, March Madness is upon us. Selection Sunday was this past weekend. Get your brackets going.

SPEAKER_01 5:58

Masters is April 9th to the 12th. It's the US Open that's always Father's Day. That's June 18th and 21st, and PJ Championships in May. So the Masters is like, yeah, in like a couple weeks, two, three weeks.

CDL Headlines And Media Spin

SPEAKER_00 6:09

I was gonna say, I remember watching Rory won it last year, right? And I was in I was in Palm Beach. Um, it was around the time you ended up coming up to see or hang out with me uh uh there. But I we that that's right, that had just finished up. Um all right. News. Um there's my um. There's the latest 200,000 CDLs that they say are not gonna get renewed. And we were just talking about it off air. Um there it basically sounds like it's all headlines because it's not like we're taking 200,000 truckers off the road. They're just simply if they don't meet certain requirements, they're not gonna be able to renew their CDL when it expires. But it's giving them an opportunity and a chance to, I guess, meet some of those requirements. And then there's the Delilah. Is it the Delilah's Law or Dahlia's Law? Yeah, it's it's Delilah. Which is uh that's one where it's it's yeah, Delilah's Law. We put this out in our newsletter, I think, last week. This is the one where it's essentially saying in order to get your CDL, there's gonna be an Engl, there's gonna be an English proficiency portion, otherwise you can't get a CDL versus having to test for it after the fact. And now they're also trying to add in that they're gonna target and uh block foreign dispatchers, which I don't know how you do that. I don't know how you enforce that is what I mean.

SPEAKER_01 7:38

I don't know either. You know the other interesting thing too, right? We were talking about before this is obviously like you have like mainstream news and headlines, and like to be honest, I never really paid that much attention to like how much fluff there's in it, right? But like when we're in this industry and you're like kind of like deep in what's actually occurring, when you see headlines like this, it's just kind of comical. Because I literally Googled this to see what the headlines were, right? On the 200,000 drivers. And absolutely, right? It's like CDL rule affecting non-citizens will take effect despite waste hauler concerns. Trump's CDL final rule strips 200,000 immigrant truck drivers of licenses. Why 200,000 immigrant truckers are losing their licenses? And it's like, kind of, but not really. And like, yeah, I mean, it's all hyperbole to get clicks and everything. But the more they do this, and the more dude, the less I read any of the news. I was talking to my cousin about that the other day. He was talking to me about something. I'm like, dude, I don't read any of it. He's like, What do you mean? I'm like, none of it means anything. I'm like, it's it's like all just marketing. It's not even like information, it's not true. And half the articles, when you look at them now, it'll say that's like three minute read. I'm like, what are you providing in three minutes? I'm like, that's basically a social media post that is like posing as a journalist article. I'm headlining a picture.

SPEAKER_00 9:01

So if you're as you're following the news when it comes to anything, but it you know let's say it's regarding trucking regulation in our industry. I listened to a podcast a couple years ago that was really interesting. It's a guy, um, Andy Bustamante, he's a former CIA guy. He's been on Lex Friedman and some other podcasts.

SPEAKER_01 9:20

I've heard him. I'm like, I know who that is.

SPEAKER_00 9:22

Yeah. So he he basically um he said if you're reading a news article, go check for the same story from a different news outlet or a couple others. And he did an example about something that I think at the time it was when Trump was going through his, he was running for his um for the election in 2024, and there was the same article, the same news story reported three different ways. One was by like Fox, one was by like CNN, and one was from something else. And they were all totally like very different headlines. So with the exact same story when you read the details of it, it was like clickbait.

The Hidden Problem With Integrations

SPEAKER_01 11:07

So it's really interesting. T Lo at Levity, right, who was a sponsor with us for a while, um, years, like him and I were talking about this. This was a while ago. They released, I think it's a browser or it's a website for news. And basically, I can't remember the name of it, but all it does is whatever you're reading in the news, you put in there, and it will give you the percentages of where the sources are. So it'll be like, okay, this article has been cited by 75% like right-leaning like websites, 30% left leaning, 5% neutral, and then it'll have links. So it literally does what you just said and it does the work for you. So if you're like, hey, how much of this is true? It will literally just go like, hey, this group of, you know, whatever websites and magazines or whatever they're called, news outlets, are basically this leaning, this leaning gives you a percentage and weights it so that you can go and dig a little deeper. Because exactly you said, like, so much of it is just spin. There's like very little, and also like there's not a lot of journalism isn't journalism anymore. Nobody pays for anybody to actually go and research these things and do these things. And everybody just wants their attention spans get shorter and shorter, and the truth gets harder and harder to actually ascertain.

SPEAKER_00 12:21

I I'll kind of add on what you said earlier. I'm gonna I just go I went to Google and I Googled 200,000 CDLs and I went to the news. Here's the headlines. News Nation 200,000 truck drivers could lose their licenses in Trump's immigration push. The LA Taco. Trump revokes commercial licenses for thousands of immigrant truckers. Freight waves. Industry is focused on 200,000 non-domiciled CDLs, but there is another 200,000 driver story nobody is covering. Overdrive. Trump administration effectively ends non-domiciled CDLs starting today. And this goes on and on, but like the only thing those all have in common is something about 200,000 licenses. Yes. But they all have a different spin. Some of them mention Trump, some of them mentioned immigration. Um, I actually thought, oh, and then the freight waves like kind of like is a bait and hook, like, oh, but no one's talking about this other 200,000.

SPEAKER_01 13:18

Well, hey, so this brings up a really good point related to, well, what we talk about, which is like transportation logistics, right? And this is the first time this dawned on me was last week. Okay. I was dealing with a couple TMSs and a few integrations with um like tools for carrier vetting and onboarding, right? And we talk a lot about on the show of like you really want to understand how the integration works to know how the tool works. Because in some instances, you need more people to be reviewing things because it doesn't do what you think it does. In some cases, you could have less people because it does what you think it does. And you can have one tool, right? For instance, like highway or trucker tools. But even the top 10 TMSs have different integrations with that same tool. So if you're talking to a highway or right, or my carrier packets, or whichever platform you're looking at, you really want to understand how that integration works with your TMS. And even from like a simple standpoint of like, what does this system and when talk to this system? And how does this system and when talk back to this system, right? What gets updated?

SPEAKER_00 14:27

Really, really important thing. Like, what's the lag in time correct to integration?

SPEAKER_01 14:32

Yeah. We saw a huge one in between um a TMS last year I was using and the one you guys were using with McLeod. That has now been resolved with that specific one. But like it just literally didn't do anything that we thought it did based on what the sales guy said on both companies. But then when you got on the tech side, and honestly, it took stolen loads for me to find this for the client. The client's like, how did this load get stolen when we're paying all this money for this tool to protect us and this TMS that's supposed to be like top end, and they're just not talking to each other anywhere near as fast or as often as we thought they would, right? But the point I was making that's related to news was I was doing this, it was like yesterday, the day before, and the one of the guys, I had like a guy from like the development team of the um the carrier onboarding and vetting tool, right? So it's like a guy that literally built the integrations. And I'm like, okay. I said, How is this working? And he said, This is what stood out to me. We defined integrations as this. And I'm like, oh, you actually have an internal definition that you use to train your employees on what is considered an integration. Because my questions were like, I know they're integrated, but to what extent, how often and how frequently? And the sales guy's like, I'm curious what so the sales guy is like, well, we we can we will classify it or determine that we have an integration offered with a TMS if basically they're connected and one talks to the other, which is like the lowest level. And I'm like, that is like the absolute, I'm like, that's not even bare minimum. Like, because from my perspective, that's not an integration. You just connected them and they don't really talk to each other anywhere enough for it to be useful.

SPEAKER_00 16:16

That's just an RSS feed, is all that is. You're pushing data.

Real Time Alerts Stop Theft

SPEAKER_01 16:20

And here's an example, right? So while it these aren't the companies, but I'll just use them as an example. So you got a TMS, right, with your carriers that are in your carrier base that you've worked with previously at any point in time, last year, this year, last week, whatever. You brought them through a tool like my carrier packets, right, or highway into your TMS. They met your rule set, they met your safety standards, your insurance, everything that you have in your criteria. And I said, okay, so if that MC becomes fraudulent yesterday, like somebody hacked it, somebody bought it, somebody stole it, whatever, like it no longer meets my rule set. And for instance, my carrier packets or highway. I said, when does my TMS and my carrier base get updated with your information? And went, what do you mean? I went, Well, they don't pass your rule set as of this morning, but in my TMS, how long does it take before the carriage that's gonna be?

SPEAKER_00 17:14

Well, let me give you an example of how it should work, right? Like we have right now um Pierce Worldwide is on McCloud with Highway, Highway Connect, load lock, all of those.

SPEAKER_01 17:25

And yours does this because we literally went to the case.

SPEAKER_00 17:26

As soon as we build a load in McLeod, it populates into load lock and highway within like 10 seconds. And if the carrier pause right there. So that's like real-time pushing out, and it's a no more than five minutes coming back.

SPEAKER_01 17:40

Pause right there, right? So here's what I found on just that one. Some TMSs, when you choose the carrier for a load, like you put them on the load but haven't sent the Raycon yet. Like you literally put them into the TMS and go, I'm gonna add the driver information to book the carrier on the load before you send the Raycon. Your TMS will send that carrier back against highway to see if there's load lock fraud alerts before they get the information. The one I was looking at last year, that alert got sent after you dispatched the truck. So you added the carrier to the TMS, they're in there. You sent the Raycon to the carrier, they sign it, still nothing happens. Then you send the, it's called the pickup alert, which is the instructions with the pickup number and the addresses to the carrier. Then the TMS sends the information over to Highway, then Highway checks it in load lock alert, but that information doesn't even go back into the TMS. It just sends you an email. So I'm like, well, wait a minute. Like we booked the truck, we sent them all the information that is the sensitive information we don't want them to have. And then the carrier that is fraudulent has the information to steal the load, and then you emailed me after. I'm like, how's that preventative?

People Training And Software Gaps

SPEAKER_00 18:49

I was like, isn't that yeah, we don't even send the rate confirmation until so like we'll do it. And this only works because we have real-time integrations with them, but like we're checking the carrier and highway. And again, if it's not highway, if we use an MCP, whatever. RMI. You want to you want to check that carrier that they meet your criteria first. And then what we do, because the tracking is done through load lock, we assign the carrier in our TMS, which assigns them in highway. We can pick the truck number from a drop-down in highway, and then it's like it auto-connects the tracking, and then we once we know it's tracking properly, there's no alerts, we send the Raycon. And then it all can all be done in 30 seconds because they talk to each other in real time. And then as far as like you mentioned, well, what if a carrier fails my compliance rules tomorrow morning and it's in transit? Well, highways, or again, whatever system you're using with a true integration, it's no more than five minutes. Within five minutes, it's it's pulling back to our TMS and it's flag, it's gonna DQ the carrier in our TMS. We're gonna get an email alert about it. The the broker, so whoever we have it set up or like the broker who's assigned to that load and our compliance team both get that alert in real time. So like and you can decide what alerts you want, um depending on which vendor you're using. But typically, if it's a uh simp, like simply just like a compliance rule, if it's through MCP or RMIS or whatever, um if a carrier all of a sudden fails a rule such as you know their insurance collapsed in transit, like you need to know in real time what's going on so you can get ahead of whatever the issue is. Or it could be that they're failing because they got reported for double brokering or hostage, whatever the rule is. If it fails, you need to be able to know instead of just hey, I checked them out two days ago. They were good, all good. So agreed.

SPEAKER_01 21:00

So just like you were saying, right? Like you really need to understand how these systems talk to each other so you know where to like layer on people or processes for the human being, right? Because like I don't have a background in like computer programming, right, or IT. I have the background more on like human being skill sets, right? And training human beings and doing those things. So like I look at software kind of like I look at a person. And I'm like, what is this doing? And if this was a person, how would this be happening, right? And I just make it as simple as I can in my head.

SPEAKER_00 21:35

Yeah. What are its capabilities? Surefalls.

unknown 21:38

Yeah.

Freight Risk And Extra Insurance

SPEAKER_01 21:39

And it's like if you kind of think of it really simply, I think I don't think you need like a hugely technical background to be able to understand what you're paying for and what protection you're getting and which systems you're spending time in. Like here's another really good example of what you were just saying is before these integrations, right? And we're old enough to have worked before that, you had to go to the UI. Like you had to literally go to the website to see this, right? So five years ago, no matter which carrier vetting tool you're using or onboarding, you had to train every employee how to read an accord form, the insurance form, how to understand what is in Safer Web, because those tools weren't even available when we started. Like you literally went to the SaferWeb. You went to FMCSA to see this data.

SPEAKER_00 22:23

Or your like your TMS might have been the vetting system. It was. But it had to it had to get its data from a person, or you might have had like some basic. I want to say like Safer was like the OG data um source, right? And it's you that's a government database. So, you know, you don't have any bells and whistles added to it. It's just checking like authority and you know, safety.

SPEAKER_01 22:49

Correct. But this is like a it's a really good thing to kind of dig into because it's like, okay, well, if you're like building a team and it it again, I want to put the caveat that like it is very different based on the type of freight you move, right? So like the cool thing that we've been able to see is like we work with lots of different brokerages. So we can see and understand like why a company that moves, call it like low theft risk commodities, doesn't need to do all of these things because like they're just not as big of a target, right? And some commodities you move like just know. Nobody's going to steal because they're too hard to probably resell in the black market, is my guess, right? Like you don't see people stealing like grain haulers, I wouldn't think. I've literally never heard of any thefts in like the bulk space related to those things. Maybe on like the tanker side, yeah. But like if you're moving pedal lumber, real quick. I've seen one of those, I think, last year is when it was. Yeah. Yeah, for sure.

SPEAKER_00 23:42

Like when you get into copper and when you're hauling trash out of New York City, like literally their trash gets hauled out on trucks. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 23:49

Well, that and I have I have a client now that brokers a lot of food waste out of grocery stores, food that expires, things that are spoilage and they need to get processed. They get processed into like fertilizer and compost and other things. Same with the cardboard. So like there is money in shipping garbage. So like for sure, it doesn't mean you're not making as much money on what you move. It's just less likely that somebody's going to steal it. So maybe you don't need the extensive products we're going to kind of outline. But then, like, we have clients and like white truck logistics that I'm doing a lot of work with, right? Like they're doing mostly frozen seafood, fresh seafood. Some of that stuff is like$500,000 for like three, four pallets. Like it's crazy. Like you get into crab legs, high-end scallops, and some of those things. Like it's very high theft and it's very high risk. And you need to make sure you're protected. At the very least, you need to know that you're getting protected for what you're paying for, is even like the bare minimum. Like you're paying for something, you want to understand like, how does this protect me? Like if you're going to put a seafood.

Tool Tiers And Email Impersonation

SPEAKER_00 24:50

This is for you and for anybody else in the space that deals with those high value, often excluded commodities. As a level of protection, we actually just set this up um this month. We've been working on it for a while. Did it? Yes. We've got a we got an insurance broker to underwrite a policy or to work with to find a company to underwrite a policy for us that basically it's a percentage of the load's value, is what the policy costs. And it covers damage, it covers theft, it covers basically all the things that we wanted it to cover to give us peace of mind. And we just build that right into the customer's rate. So just a little side tidbit there that insurance policies do exist. And we've talked about it before. Like a lot of times you can get insurance for anything, it's just gonna cost you money. This has actually been one that a lot of insurance carriers are like, we're not touching frozen seafood anymore. We're just not because of the the amount of risk and uh potential claims payout. But um I have a question.

SPEAKER_01 27:00

Is that the same guy you referred me to, Brett?

SPEAKER_00 27:02

I got a call from the uh no, Brett. Brett's with um AR insurance. Yeah. Yeah, he does um he does a different kind of insurance. This is actually a guy, the company's his guy's name is Mark Vickers from Reliance Partners. Um, he was we got referred to him from our insurance, our main insurance company, um, who said like we just it's Avalon Risk. And they're like, Yeah, we're just not writing those policies anymore. But I know my competitor, this guy, does, so at least I'll pass you off to someone that can help you out.

SPEAKER_01 27:34

Um, yeah, I want to get connected with him because I'm evaluating a lot of insurance warehouses and redoing that for a few different things. So that's fantastic, right? Because like to bring this back into like the tech and the people side, right? Everyone just kind of goes, well, this is what they recommend to protect me, so I pay for it. And the interesting thing that I find, especially coming on with new clients, or even like people that don't come on as clients that will reach out to us and we'll talk to. And I'm like, oh, I always ask the basic questions like, what does your like software stack look like? Your TMS, your onboarding, your vetting tools, right? Like, how are you guys set up? And the thing that I find maybe it's not surprising anymore, but I did it first, is like they're like, oh, for instance, like we use highway. And I'm like, okay, which version of Highway? And they're like, what do you mean?

SPEAKER_00 28:20

I'm like, well, now there's like there's a whole spectrum of highway now.

SPEAKER_01 28:24

There's like five of them, right? Like five different features or whatever they call different levels of protection you could have based on price and what you need. So like just first thing out of the gate is like just because you're right.

SPEAKER_00 28:38

I think there's literally five tiers of highway now.

SPEAKER_01 28:40

There's there's like, I know there's connect, there's load lock, there's the ELD tracking.

SPEAKER_00 28:43

There's load lock, load lock plus, freight exchange or trusted freight exchange, connect, and then the just the basic one where you don't onboard, but you can just vacuum.

SPEAKER_01 28:52

And and the ratecon feature that you can turn or turn on or off. But yeah, you don't need to necessarily use it. But that's another good point. Like you can have load lock, but might not be actually using the ratecon delivery system in your TMS, which is another level of protection. So again, this isn't in any way like a promotion of one tool versus another. These are just examples of like vast differences between having something and what you actually have, can be very, very different based on what your needs are. But you also want to ask these questions like, how is this working and how does this system talk to another one? Right. Because here's another example that we I found, this was last year, right? Was folks that were using um like MCP and highway to verify like contact information, like email addresses. A lot of those systems weren't talking at all to TMSs. So if you onboarded a broke or a carrier, right? That's a really good point. Yeah. You onboarded a carrier, okay. The carrier's still good, but some criminal got into their domain and created an email address, and the the legitimate carrier is unaware a criminal has an email address with the same domain. So they are impersonating a legitimate trucking company and stealing loads. And the trucking company owner might have no idea this is happening. So a lot of these systems do IP tracking and multi-factor authentication to make sure whoever's logging in is legitimate, right? But if it doesn't feed into your TMS and your employees book the trucks and the dispatchers in the TMS without looking at that, you can get robbed working with who you think is a legitimate carrier that you've worked with for years, and it just looks like a new dispatcher they have. Meanwhile, it's somebody in Azerbaijan that's like stealing dozens of loads today that nobody's aware of until tomorrow, right? So again, like even who you're emailing matters. Like some of these tools have email plugins that are constantly checking who you're emailing to give you indications of this email has been flagged, this email is legitimate. And there's so many ways that you can basically become a victim of theft and like cargo theft, whether it's physically stealing the load or stealing the information and getting a legitimate carrier to go steal a load that they're unaware of, like you really want to understand how you're setting up the systems. Because if you think it's talking to the TMS and it doesn't, then you don't have enough people. Or you need the integration to be done differently or at a higher level because like you're not even getting the benefit of the tool you're paying for because you're operating in one system and they don't talk to each other.

Tracking Integrations That Mislead Ops

SPEAKER_00 31:33

Yeah, I think at the core of it all, the spectrum of which you mix human beings and software and integrations on one end of the spectrum, like we said before, fully human. They do everything manually. The other end of the spectrum would be a full integration with adequate human oversight. And I would never go beyond that limit and remove the human oversight because that's where that's where you get it. Like it's physically possible, but you don't want to go there because if you just hit like set it and forget it, and you don't know if something goes wrong or if it's working in a way that you didn't expect, you're in a really dangerous situation. So and then there's a whole spectrum in between that, right? How much human oversight is there, how much human interaction is there, how much integration is there, and you know, like because you made a good point before of what data is being integrated between the two systems and what's not. And this is why I think a lot of brokers that I've seen, even though like we'll use a load board, for example, DAT. Even though DAT is very, very commonly integrated into most of the major TMSs where it can postloads, it can pull truck postings, it can pull date rate data, still most of the brokers on my team, they still operate in the DAT environment online just because DAT is the is the source, they're going to have the most data that's out there. And if you're already on multiple screens, you know, how hard is it to click a different tab over and say, all right, here's all the rate data and market conditions and information for this specific load? You can't necessarily pull all that into an easy integration into a TMS, right? Same thing with like carrier vetting, right? Yes, I want the basic information, I want enough information to come to my TMS to stop my brokers from booking this carrier on a load and sending a rate con. Um but how realistic is it for every single data point that's in this vetting system to push through where is it gonna go in the TMS? What you know, so there's there's like a whole level and a spectrum of I think you gotta find your happy medium, and I think you can do it like fairly slowly over time, like baby steps. Because you first of all, I think every employee on your team needs to learn like the the manual way of doing things before you, you know, before it's kind of like you should learn you gotta learn how to do a three-point turn or parallel park without a backup camera before you can rely on the backup camera.

SPEAKER_01 34:12

Here's my other my other analogy that I always use is you have to learn how to do long division by hand, not because you're not gonna use a calculator, but so that when the calculator gives you the wrong answer because you fat-fingered a number, you can at least look at it and go, like, that doesn't seem right.

SPEAKER_00 34:29

That doesn't look right. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 34:30

Yeah. And then do it again, right? Because it's not like, again, you're gonna be doing that over and over the hard way, but you want to know how to do it manually so that when you automate it, you can see where the errors are. Here's another one, right? So talking about just like integrations and like fraud, but like tracking tools, there's a vast difference in how these function and how that information gets back and forth in a TMS, right? So you have ELD integrations, which are live and you can see where their locations are. But not every carrier is willing to keep the integration live or for all their trucks, or with leased on drivers creates another issue, right? And another thing that I saw in TMSs where like this was, I think, the best intent was there was a tracking tool that basically, hey, when this driver arrives at the shipper, the status in your TMS goes, he's on site. Okay, so you don't have to call. Great idea. But in practice, here's an issue that we found. One is on the driver side, it works two ways. When they're physically on site, but also the driver can click the app and say, I am manually on site. He can literally say, like, I'm here, even though the geofense didn't catch him. So there was a client we had where the drivers were 300 miles away clicking, I'm on site, so that nobody called them and that they didn't that nobody knew they were late for their pickup. So, like, nobody had any idea except the customer that all these trucks kept showing up an hour, two, three hours late. Because the driver's like, Oh, I know I'll get loaded when I get there anyway. I'm not gonna tell the broker or the customer. Customers yelling at the broker going, why are all your trucks late? Brokers looking at the TMS going, like, everybody was checked in on time. I have no idea what's going on. And then when I look at the integration, I'm like, oh. So if you go again to the website for the tracking tool, you can see the difference. It will say driver initiated location. And another switch will say, these are geofense. So you would know, hey, call these five drivers. They manually said they're on site, or look at the GPS and you can literally see, like in Macro Point, was it? And I'm like, oh, these guys are literally 150 miles away, but it says they're on site. They're a different color in Macro Point's website. But the TMS shows them all exactly the same as if they're all on site. And like now you need somebody to learn, no, you got to go back and forth between your TMS and the website for your tracking tool. And it's like, well, what's the point of the integration if I got to go back and forth anyway? Like, is it actually adding value?

Business Model Drives Your Tech Stack

SPEAKER_00 36:56

Yeah, I want to. So that's the whole thing is like based on not one level of integration is necessarily better than another in that regard. It's it's how you it's how you use it then, right? So like if you had like in the old school days when we didn't even use tracking regularly, you just did check calls. Like you call your driver or call a dispatcher. Oh, yeah, he's in, you know, he's got the truck stop on I-80 or whatnot. Um, and then you know, we start with with tracking, right? Like on one end of the spectrum, if your TMS has a really strong integration with you know, trucker tools or macro point or you know, load lock or whatever, and you have a map on your on your operations planning board, right? You should be able to see all your loads, click through them, you see out a map, and you're gonna see where they've last pinged. Right? You can see it as an image, you can see it as a uh like a history on the load, like a a almost like a manual check call was entered, but it was automatically entered. Um so that's like you know, one level of integration, but you still have the human verifying that that all looks right. And then, but let's say in your case, like maybe you're maybe you don't have the integration with where it's gonna send location updates to a map in your TMS. Well, if that's the case, that's fine, but then you need to be operating in a separate environment for your tracking updates, and or having a manual check call process um kind of in in you know, in sync with your GPS tracking or telematics tracking.

SPEAKER_01 38:29

Right.

SPEAKER_00 38:29

So, like what that's like we said before, like humans and tech are gonna have strengths, weaknesses, capabilities, shortfalls. Based on what those are, that's how you can decide hey, this employee is gonna be really, really good at sales and customer relationship, but they're not very detail-oriented, and we're not gonna have them in an operations role. Or this person is so solid on keeping, you know, multitasking, keeping track of all the loads here, but they don't know how to build a report all with a new customer. So we're gonna keep them in the software and let the account manager do it. And the same goes with tech. Like this tech is really, really good at providing us with um location updates, right? So we're gonna use it for that. But it stinks as far as carrier pre-vetting and screening. Like once we vetted the carrier, boom, this one is great for tracking, but we don't want to use it for anything besides what it's excellent at. And it's yeah, so it's kind of like that balance. You gotta then you gotta take which employee you're gonna have to do and what role with what tech is gonna do, what process, and and marry them together. Like we were talking about um earlier, like we met with somebody recently about a consulting opportunity, and I was like, man, the first like they just need a few hours of literally just like planning out the business model. Because not every brokerage is gonna look the same. Like, if someone's like, hey, tell me how to start a brokerage, it's like, well, it really depends. Like it depends on who you are, what does your team look like? What kind of tech do you already have? What kind of access to capital and funds? What can you afford? And what do we have to manually do? So, like, there is a whole lot that goes into this. And this is where like if you're a business leader or a team leader, it is really, really important for you to have a you know, have this in the back of your brain when you're planning out how you're gonna grow to the next level. And, you know, just because a salesperson calls you and says, Hey, we have this new great piece of software, you guys need it. It might be great software, but if you have no idea how to use it or if your people aren't tech savvy, it's a waste of your time and money. And it gives you false sense of security.

EDI Clarity Versus Integration Claims

SPEAKER_01 40:27

So yeah, it did. It reminds me of like when I when I used to work in finance, I had a buddy that ran like a big investment firm. And he was, again, very people-facing, very like a sales guy, right? But he always used to joke because um would laugh, like I'd go to his office, and I'm like, dude, you got like 30 people. They all like they used to call it like the bullpen. He's like, Oh, that's where we lock all the squirrels. He's like, they all just sit there and crunch numbers all day. They're fantastic with numbers, but we don't let them talk to people at all. It's like he's like, zero social skills, very, very good at math. And he's like, the sales guys need to understand how to do the math, but they don't rarely do the math all day long because like it's just not their personality type. And to your point, like, you want to understand who and how these people like to work, what they enjoy doing to know where to plug them in. Because going all the way back to that example I was talking about a minute ago on just the tracking, for that client, we had to hire and train like three or four people to literally go back and forth between the systems because they didn't talk together the way we thought they did. And they had to literally go through Macro Point and look for all the drivers that manually checked in, call them, and then let the customer know or the broker know, hey, this guy's gonna be late. Do we need to reschedule? Like that is service that we're selling to our customers to get onboarded. You probably want to understand how you're gonna execute that and be able to provide it, right? And that's where the software, like you said, meets the people and the skill sets so that from the customer's point of view, they know when their trucks are on time or late or have an issue. And if you're just making a bunch of assumptions, you're gonna spend a whole lot of time prospecting and onboarding customers and churning them over and over again because you're just assuming these things are working the way a sales guy told you in like one call, right? And like the the one thing that I've learned more than anything in the past. Yeah. And they that's why I said like that jumped out at me in that meeting, is like also all these companies have different definitions of what an integration is, right? Like they are literally defined by the company selling you the product. It's not like you can go to like and well, we used to have a dictionary, right? Where like you would go and like, what does this word mean and see exactly what it means? All the companies just make up their own definition for the words that are in their spec sheet, like, we're integrated. Like, what does that mean? Like how compared to EDI, right?

SPEAKER_00 42:50

Like EDI, there are literally codes that are like you can't say we do EDI and have it be a like a gray area. It's like you either do or you don't. And here's the codes. So, like, what what are the different EDI codes for transportation?

SPEAKER_01 43:05

Um, here's a funny thing. Yes and no, there is still a gray area in that because I remember when I was trying to integrate um a very, very large brokerage with a very, very large shipper through EDI. They had a very good TMS that they built that was proprietary. They didn't have enough fields in their TMS to capture and hold all of the EDI data that the shipper actually used because they did international and the TMS was built for like truckload and domestic. So there were information that literally had no place. It was being sent, but like they couldn't hold it anywhere because they didn't have the fields in it.

API Versus Webhook In Plain English

SPEAKER_00 43:44

To that point, yes. I think EDI very clear, like so I've had I pull it up. Like there are EDI codes that are specific to a certain thing. So like EDI code 204 is a load tender for a motor carrier is a load tender. 210 is a motor carrier, freight details, and invoice. 211, motor carrier bill of lading. And then you get into like other, you know, you've got um let's see, like there's international stuff, there's rail stuff, there's all these different ones. And I guess to my point, is like with EDI, it's it's at least closer to like black and white, because you either can send and receive those codes and or that data, I should say, or you can't. Whereas like an integration, when you use that term, you know, um DAT. Well, I'll give you a great example. This is real, okay? So we are still in the process of evaluating a new TMS. And I'll give you the name of well, I won't give the names because I feel like that's maybe not fair to say one of them. So we looked at one company and they said, yeah, we've got a full integration with Highway. And we looked so we had basically two TMSs that we were like, all right, great, these are our top two that we really like. Um they both say they have full integrations with highway, and um it came down to end up being like a implementation and cost and whatnot was it swayed us in one direction. So we start going into the you know, planning and implementation of how we're gonna set everything up, and then we realize um all the things that it missed that it didn't have. It had like a very basic onboarding option for highway, but nothing else. So like couldn't send your rate cons, couldn't do your load tracking, and they're like, oh yeah, we'll get it. Once we identify it, they're like, oh yeah, yeah, we'll get that done. Give us a few months and we'll get it done. So we go to highway and we're like, hey, these guys said they're gonna get it done in a you know a few months, and they're like, Highway's like, they're not even on our 2026 roadmap for an integration for those tools. So like that's where like then they say, Yeah, we're integrated. What does that mean? And then so then, you know, now we're talking with the other TMS that was our um, you know, our other top contender. And I had to make it very clear like, what is what are your integrations? And I went to Highway too, and I said, You know what tools we're paying you for? What of a TMS does it fully support and integrate with these tools? And I said, All right, well, you've got obviously the cloud that you're on right now. Here's the other like five. And he said, I wouldn't recommend these two based off of some of the functionality and issues we've had. Like we're sending them the data that they want, but they've had some connection issues on the way back. So they basically said there's like three TMSs that are, you know, again, enterprise TMSs, right? We're not talking about a proprietary one that a brokerage owns themselves. Um, because those are totally separate. Uh, but there's basically three that you can pick from and you're gonna have the same experience as what you're having right now. So basically, if you think about two, because you already have one of them and you're trying to leave that one. So but that's like why it's super important to understand like when someone says we have this integration, like what what do you mean specifically? Yes. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 47:10

Now, and again, you were talking about you know definitions of EDI. Here's another one that I think is really helpful that like you should keep in mind when you're talking about this. The difference between an API and a webhook. Most people will explain them as if they're the same thing, but they are very different, right? I'm gonna tell you how to speak that language. The primary difference, right, is the communication model, right? An API is a pool mechanism where the client needs to request the data, right? A webhook uses a push mechanism to automatically send the data when an event occurs, right?

SPEAKER_00 47:45

So when you're thinking about your systems, giving an example or give the audience an example of one of each of those and the brokerage's environment. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 47:54

Let me so okay. So like just a generic example. You can kind of like that's the thing, is like you'll kind of see them interchangeably, but it really matters, right?

SPEAKER_00 48:04

So it sounds like one is just the opposite of the other. One's pushing, one's pulling.

SPEAKER_01 48:09

Well, like, yes, one is a push, one is a pull, right? But in an API, right, it allows two software systems to communicate, right? Typically using a request response model. So, like sometimes even though it's two ways, your TMS needs to request it to get it. And if it doesn't, it doesn't happen, right? So even though it's two ways, means it talks back and forth to each other, right? It's pool. So the client has to initiate the request under an API, meaning like that system has to ask the other system for the update or it doesn't get sent, right? That makes sense under API.

SPEAKER_00 48:47

It's it's it's basically like requesting it and then pull and then getting the response of the data back.

SPEAKER_01 48:52

So the TMS has to basically ask Highway or MCP for the information to get it. When highway or MCP changes, it doesn't automatically show up here if your TMS doesn't ask for it. Okay. It's API. Now, webhook right is one way, right, but it's a push. So you can have a webhook from like MCP or highway, where every time a carrier's rule set changes, it pushes that information from highway because they see it first or MCP, and then your TMS catches it and changes it. And if your system is to alert you when changes happen to a carrier, like MCP, highway, right, or any of those tools, right? That system should just push the information to my TMS. I don't want my TMS to have to ask you for it over and over again. I want your system to just tell my. Yeah, that it changed, right? So that's a webhook. And also like that matters in your TMS because your status changes are usually API or webhook. So I booked a carrier, right? Or I dispatched a carrier, right? Or the carrier's on the load. If that system doesn't either push it or ask for it, right, it won't talk to the other one because the other one doesn't know to ask for information. Does that make sense?

SPEAKER_00 50:09

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, this is stuff that like, you know, when you're evaluating. So I'll c I'll I'll kind of make it more generalized here. Okay. Based on the size of your brokerage, um, there's a chance that you're probably not gonna have a dedicated IT person, right? More likely than not, until you get to a larger scale, you're probably not gonna have a dedicated IT person. Um, but that's a hat that you've gotta someone's gotta wear to a certain extent in your company and understand what that means for your tech stack's capabilities and its limitations, right? Like the fact that I don't even know I didn't know what a webhook versus an API was until we just had this conversation. But I do understand the capabilities and shortfalls of the tech stack that I use on a daily basis. So it's really important to have a basic understanding of how these things talk to each other and where there might be a vulnerability.

AI Agents Can Amplify Bad Data

SPEAKER_01 51:07

And and even if you don't, right? Like again, I I'll just read like this chart is really helpful. And I literally just put API versus webhook in Google and it gave me like a summary, right? So API pull, webhook push. Data flow, two ways under API, one way under webhook, right? So API, the initiation matters because the API, the client, initiates the request. Under webhook, the server communicates it when an event happens, right? It's not just set on a time, it's set on something changing. So the status of a load, right, will initiate it on a webhook instead of it just happening every three minutes or five minutes, right? Now, APIs, when it's related to real time, requires constant going back and forth for updates, right? Where the webhook, as soon as it happens, it pushes it through. So you are the one manually changing your TMS. You want it to happen when you change it, not every three or five minutes, right? APIs are a little more complex, but have more control. Webhooks are easier. And the other easy way to figure out which one they are, APIs are almost done behind the scenes all the time. Webhooks are just URLs, they're little like website with a bunch of words and letters after it, right? That you put into your TMS to initiate a webhook. So like I can go into like Thai, for example, and I can just grab the webhooks and just literally copy and paste them and then hit save and it works, right? And API is more on like the back end where usually like the developer has to do it for your two systems. So webhooks are pretty prevalent and not one is not better than the other, but you just kind of want to think about like the human and what the computer's doing, right? The computer, right, of your tool is constantly checking the FMCSA. Genlogs is taking checking when a carrier was seen, right? They're doing all of these things all of the time in the background, right? But some of the things are human, like adding the carrier, right? Sending a tracking link, sending a rate con, right? Like if I'm manually doing that, I don't want my system to just keep talking. I want it to do it right when I do it, right? Because then it's basically like the human sending it from one computer to a different one and then letting me know, hey, was that good or was there a problem, right? And like you don't need to know that level, like you said, but like when you're just asking, how does my TMS talk to yours? You said full integration. Tell me what full means. Here's what I'm paying for in your example was highway. I pay for this, this, and this. How does your system use that? And how do I have access to it in your TMS, right? And then they'll explain it. It will do this, it won't do that. And then all you do is say, like, okay, is that webhook or API? And then when they tell you, go, tell me what that means in layman's terms. They will explain it to you, right? Like, you don't need to have these definitions memorized. You just need to ask the questions and ask them to explain it to you so that at least you know, okay, I'm paying this tool thousands of dollars a month and this one thousands of dollars a month. When and how do they talk to each other or what needs to occur for them to talk to each other? Because they're vastly different. Again, whether it's tracking, carrier onboarding, carrier vetting, or TMS. Because now when everyone's talking about AI automations, if these systems aren't doing that and you need people and you try to automate it with AI, it gets even worse because it just goes faster and makes mistakes faster.

SPEAKER_00 54:28

So, like that that's another good point on AI. I know we're we're getting kind of deep into the episode here, but I would caution every anybody out there. Um, I'm not saying AI is bad or don't use it, but make sure you understand what you're getting what your what decision making you're passing off to a non-human. Meaning something as simple as is it going to send an email without someone on my team reviewing that email first? It's all great to have an email drafted up, but you might want to have a human being you know review that first. If it's a very basic yesno, okay, maybe, right? But if it's a decision or if it's if it's a decision or an email that could cost you money, cost you a customer, et cetera, then you can get dangerous. Like as I've gone through this TI TMS exploration, a lot of these companies are like, they their number one pitch is like, oh, we've got this AI agent inside and it'll do everything, it'll read your emails and it'll auto-build your loads and it'll send quotes to your customers. And like the majority of the folks on our team are like, we don't want that.

SPEAKER_01 55:36

Like And it doesn't work that way.

SPEAKER_00 55:38

No, like and then you ask, like, oh, can I ratchet it back on what it's gonna do? And oftentimes they're like, Well, you either use it or you don't. I'm like, all right, well, just don't even include it then because we don't want to, you know, people think it's a little intrusive if there's an AI bot in their in their company, in their work email and you know, whatever.

SPEAKER_01 55:54

Well, that's very true, right? And like, uh I'll kind of like maybe even like wrap on this was like I did this with Tila where we really dug into these and tried to see what we could do and how long it would take, right? And the interesting thing is if your underlying systems aren't like literally a hundred percent accurate, it gets really bad really quick. Like, we just wanted to test out could we have AI? Because I was able to train AI on my voice. I was able to do that through like 11 labs with literally sounded like me. I was able to get the phone connected, I was able to make a text or voice calls. And I'm like, I just wanted to call drivers right.

SPEAKER_00 56:31

And then learn how to talk in your style or just the sound of your voice?

SPEAKER_01 56:35

No, no, it's pretty close. Um, it doesn't get the inflections right, like the words you use and like the lingo you'll use.

SPEAKER_00 56:42

It's good enough for a check call.

SPEAKER_01 56:44

It wasn't good enough for me to do a five-minute video because I tested it out on my old scripts and I was able to train an actual one to look like me and my voice. So I got me and my voice right, but even in a five-minute video, the inflections are all off. So it'll just like exaggerate for no reason and then talk like in a different tone and it's not matched with the the arc of like that's not coming though, man.

SPEAKER_00 57:07

It's coming.

Final Takeaway And Sign Off

SPEAKER_01 57:07

Right. But here's the example, right? So, like we were testing this out, and if your system isn't a hundred percent talking to each other perfectly, it just started like we just put my phone number in. And I'm like, okay, let's turn this on to see if it will call drivers, right? That in macro point showed they manually checked in to just say, hey, it looks like you're on site, but weren't really sure. Are you actually at the shipper? Are you going to be a little bit late? So we can update the customer. Something very simple, right? But again, since the DMS wasn't able to get the information exactly from macro point, it couldn't see the difference between manually checked in and actually geofense, like was located there. It just called every driver over and over again. So we turned it on in an hour. My phone must have rang like 55 times, like every three minutes. It just kept ringing because the system was going, this driver's late, this driver's late, this driver's late. But when you looked at the system, you're like, oh, well, they're not late. They're like five miles away, and like they're gonna be there in like literally 10 minutes. And it just calls everybody. And you're like, no wonder as a truck driver, people are getting irritated going, like, I don't want AI calling me because like it's rarely calling me about the right thing. And it's not necessarily that the AI isn't working correctly, it's that the system it's connected to. A human would look at that and go, that's fine. But if you just look at the numbers and the statuses, it looks very different. So again, like understanding how these things are connected, I just think is like the big takeaway because like you want to know where you're gonna put people, where your risk is, and everyone's risk tolerance is different, like you've said. You and I have been doing this for years. Like Pierce has a very different risk tolerance than like I've had with a lot of clients, and they're set up differently. Not because one is better or worse, their preferences and they're related to like what risk and also what insurance you have, like you mentioned earlier. What insurance do you have?

SPEAKER_00 58:55

What kind of freight are you moving? What you know, what business model do you have? Like, if you have a bunch of W-2s in an office with supervision over them versus a bunch of 1099 agents that are kind of operating like rogue for lack of better terms, like you're gonna have different things that you've got to do to navigate how you're gonna do business. So, oh yeah. This is a good discussion, man.

SPEAKER_01 59:18

Very, very much so. I I do I think it's super important. What's that?

SPEAKER_00 59:23

Is that anything else on this, like this specific topic before we wrap it here?

SPEAKER_01 59:26

Here's the last thing I would add, because this is what I said like a couple days ago in one of these meetings about connecting these and choosing a different TMS and how and which one talk to each to know which was the best fit, right? Was I'm like, in every instance where somebody has called me about a load stolen, I'm like, I can find whether or not it was true or not in like 30 seconds, right? Like the human being side, like I can literally go to an MCP or like a highway, right, or RMIS. And I'm like, it doesn't even take me a minute and a half to go directly to where I think we most likely were vulnerable. And I'm like, yep, that load was stolen. They're like, how did you see that? I'm like, well, in one case, you booked a van and this carrier has one truck and it's a flatbed. So you probably got robbed, right?

SPEAKER_00 1:00:07

And some of them Or they've never operated in this state ever.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:10

Never been seen in this state.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:11

I think Ryan Joyce does a great job with his gen logs, like little short videos on that stuff.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:16

So yeah, and like I get like that's the cool, like we have access to a lot of these different tools. So a lot of times, like I can have I have RMIS, I'll have highway, I'll have MCP and Gen logs, and I can see which one catches it. And I'm like, I can see very quickly. But also I know that automating almost any of them, I'm like, that system, that information doesn't even get to this system. So even if they were connected, you wouldn't have seen that unless you actually manually looked at it or talked to this person. So again, even with all the available tech and all the advancements, and everybody everybody's worried that AI is just gonna eliminate your jobs, like maybe it's around the corner, but it sure shit isn't here today. So I don't know. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:55

All right. Final thoughts, Ben.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:58

Whether you believe you can or believe you can't, you're right.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:02

And until next time, go bells.