TransportAssistant is trucking dispatch software that joins the ELDs, reefers, TMS and
load board you already pay for into one board, then keeps watch on it all night. AI reads
your paperwork and answers your drivers while it runs. On one real night, 210 raw alerts
became the four that needed a person — and the next twenty trucks arrive without the next
dispatcher.
Every feature was built inside a working 150-truck carrier.
150refrigerated trucks running it every day and every night
Day onetheir dispatchers have tested every step before it reached anyone else
Theirknow-how is in the rules — the thresholds, the exceptions, what is worth a 3 a.m. call
The shift nobody covers
The claim that starts at 3:14 and arrives in March.
03:14AM
Reefer temperature monitoring is worth exactly what it is worth at 3 a.m. A reefer on
load 41822 has been six degrees warm for forty-one minutes. The driver texted about it an
hour ago. Nobody is at the desk.
In March the claim arrives, and the readings that would have won it were
never assembled. The detention on the same load was never billed. The
argument is settled from somebody's recollection of a phone call.
TransportAssistant was awake. It built the evidence pack the moment the alarm
fired, opened a breakdown card from the driver's own words, sent him one
acknowledgment so he wasn't texting into a void, paged the single person on
call — and left a handover note for whoever walks in at six.
24 hours of readings either sideEvery sample, timestamped, from the reefer itself
The load and the customer it ran underCarried on the alarm at the moment it fired
What the driver said, and whenInbound thread attached verbatim
Assembled automatically · Nothing sent to the customerOne document
The last piece
You have bought every system except the one that joins them.
Your fleet is not under-tooled. You have the ELDs, the reefer portals, the TMS, the load
board, the messaging. Each one was bought to solve a problem, and each one solved it.
What nobody ever sold you is the join — so the join gets done by a person with eleven
tabs open, and that person, not the software, is the part that stops scaling.
Growth isn't capped by trucks. It's capped by attention.
You can always find another truck, another driver, another lane. What you cannot find
is another set of eyes that already knows which receiver holds trucks for four hours
and which customer pays late whatever the contract says.
So past a certain size nobody is watching the fleet any more — they are sampling it.
And the unwatched share is exactly where the claims, the unbilled detention and the
missed appointments come from. Losses stop tracking the truck count and start
outrunning it.
TransportAssistant watches all of it, all the time, and only interrupts a person when
a person is genuinely required. That is the whole product, and it is why the same
crew can carry the next block of trucks.
5 – 15 trucks
One person holds all of it
Nothing is written down because nothing needs to be. It works, and it works well.
15 – 40 trucks
The tabs multiply
A second ELD after an acquisition. A reefer portal. The TMS, the load board, the messaging vendor. Somebody is now the integration.
40 – 80 trucks
Watching becomes sampling
Nobody sees the whole fleet any more. They check the parts they remember to check, and the surprises arrive from the rest.
80+ trucks
Growth pays the back office, not you
Every block of new trucks needs another head, and most of the margin those trucks brought in leaves with the hire.
With TransportAssistant
The ceiling moves
The watching is done by software that does not get tired, forget a truck or take a week off. Your people spend their day on the exceptions — which is the only part that ever needed them.
What it watches
Nineteen ways a load goes wrong. It knows all of them by name.
Every hours-of-service, reefer and appointment alert is scored twice — how bad it is, and whether it needs a human
right now. That second judgment is the difference between a board a
dispatcher reads and one they stop opening after a week.
Critical
appointment_risk
Cannot legally make the appointment
Miles left, average road speed, and the driver's remaining drive clock. If the arithmetic doesn't work, you hear about it while there's still time to reschedule.
Critical
reefer_alarm
Reefer off setpoint
Live box temperature against the setpoint for the commodity, with your own tolerance. Excursions open an evidence pack the moment they start.
Critical
hos_violation
HOS violation logged
The moment the ELD records it — not the next morning when somebody runs a report and finds out you already own the problem.
Warning
hos_drive
Out of drive time
What is actually left on the 11-hour clock, per driver, across every connected ELD. Shown as time remaining, not a percentage nobody can act on.
Warning
hos_shift
Out of shift
The 14-hour window closing while the truck is still loaded. The one that turns a delivery into tomorrow's problem.
Warning
hos_cycle
Running out of cycle
The 70-hour clock, days ahead of it biting, while there is still time to plan a reset around it rather than around a load.
Warning
appointment_late
Past its appointment
Delivery and middle stops both. The customer already knows. This is so you are not the last to, and the call comes from you.
Warning
gps_stale
No position for hours
A truck that stops reporting is either parked somewhere it shouldn't be or has a dead unit. Both are worth a phone call.
Warning
idle_on_load
Parked on a running load
Stationary for hours mid-trip, with the stop zone named — at the shipper, at the receiver, or nowhere in particular. Detention starts here.
Warning
trailer_separated
Trailer separated from the truck
Reefer and tractor drifting apart, with how long since they were last together. Catches drops nobody wrote down.
Daytime
paperwork_missing
Delivered, no paperwork
Real money, and genuinely not a 3 a.m. problem. It's held back and queued for the morning chase list instead of waking anyone.
Warning
pickup_late
Pickup slipping
A booked load whose truck is not where it needs to be to make the pickup. Caught while there is still a truck to swap in.
Warning
reefer_at_risk
Reefer drifting by day
A box trending away from its target before it is an alarm — the office sees it on the day shift, not the claim in March.
Warning
detention_clock
Detention clock running
The truck is still on the dock and the free hours are running out. Warned before they end, so the call to the customer happens while it still counts.
Warning
idle_unexplained
Engine running for no reason
Idling with nothing to explain it — not a stop, not a storm, not a dock. Shown with the fuel it is costing.
Warning
driver_unanswered
Driver waiting on a reply
A driver asked something and nobody has answered. The message that sits unread is the one that becomes a problem.
Check
load_implausible
Load that doesn't add up
The truck is nowhere near the load it is assigned to. Usually a wrong assignment; occasionally the first sign of something worse.
Check
load_moved
Load changed underneath you
The two exports disagree about a load — a new stop, a new time. Surfaced before someone plans against the old version.
Check
feed_stale
A data feed has gone quiet
When an ELD or reefer feed stops answering, the board says so. Silence is never shown as "all clear".
What it can do
Eleven screens that close the eleven tabs.
Every board below is built from live data you already generate. No new hardware,
no new devices in the cabs, no asking drivers to install anything.
Fleet map
Every ELD fleet and every reefer on one map, refreshed continuously — positions, speed, driver and the load they're under. Active severe-weather warnings are drawn over it, and a route can be checked for low bridges and weight limits before the truck leaves.
→ “Which trucks are inside 200 miles of Laredo and empty tomorrow?” → “Alert me the second 4412 rolls into the Wytheville yard.”
Dispatch board
One ranked list, not eleven separate reports. Each row carries the truck, the driver, the clock, the load, the customer and the next stop — everything you need to decide without opening a second system.
→ Resolve an alert and it stays resolved — no re-ringing every poll. → Sorted by who needs you, not by whichever system shouted last.
Night watch
Overnight triage that judges each alert against the question a dispatcher would ask at 3 a.m. — does this need a person now? Then a morning handover note and a scorecard on how the night went.
Every reefer, its setpoint, its actual box temperature and its alarm history in one grid. Per-commodity targets and your own tolerance, not the vendor's default.
→ Excursion → evidence pack, automatically.
Driver messaging
Most messaging vendors are outbound only. Here the reply comes back threaded against the truck and the load, in the same window as the alert that prompted it.
→ Urgent inbound opens a breakdown card by itself.
Rate confirmation → load
Drop in a rate con, BOL or POD. It reads out the load number, customer, stops, appointment windows, rate and equipment, shows you what it found, and creates the load once you agree.
→ You see every field before anything is saved. → Documents land in your own storage, filed against the load.
Load prices
Posted loads and rate-per-mile by state, lane and equipment type, refreshed as the board moves — so the question “what is Texas paying tonight?” does not need a second window and a spreadsheet.
→ Rate per mile, posted age, equipment type. → Price alerts when a lane you care about moves. → Empty trucks and coverage live on their own board.
PM & shop
Preventive maintenance is the one shop job that is never a surprise. A calendar with a fixed daily capacity, a clock per truck, and a loud flag on the ones nobody booked.
→ Engine faults and driver-reported defects, feeding straight in.
Notes & boards
Sticky notes that actually chase you, with priorities and reminders that pop up in every open tab. Kanban boards for breakdowns and recovery, exportable to a spreadsheet when someone asks.
→ A note nobody acknowledged comes back.
Severe weather
Official warnings matched against every truck's position: not a weather map, but the sentence “three of your trucks are inside a winter storm warning right now.”
→ Only blizzards, ice, tornadoes and the like may wake a driver.
Connected devices
A small desktop client turns the dispatch machine into a device the board can reach — pull an export, read a load number off screen, take a screenshot for the record. Jobs queue one at a time, so nothing collides.
→ Bridges the systems that never got an API.
The AI
Four jobs nobody wanted, done properly, all night.
We do not sell “AI” as a feeling. Each of these is one specific, boring, expensive job
that used to need a person with a spare hour — named, scoped, and switched off until you
turn it on. Just as important is where we deliberately do not use it: what it cannot do is
defined as tightly as what it can.
01
It knows where not to use a model
Deciding whether a truck can legally make a 06:00 appointment is arithmetic: miles left,
road speed, drive clock. Deciding whether a reefer is off setpoint is a subtraction. None
of that is guesswork, so none of it is given to a model — it is written down, testable,
and it returns the same answer twice.
A live board threw 210 alerts one night. Sixty-seven were critical. Ninety-two of the 210
were missing paperwork, which nobody chases at three in the morning. Four things
genuinely needed a person. That triage is rules you can read, not a model you trust.
→ AI is used where language is: reading a scan, answering a driver. → Everywhere else, the boring, checkable answer wins.
02
It reads the paperwork
A rate confirmation arrives as a PDF, a fax that became a PDF, or a photograph a driver
took in a truck stop parking lot at an angle. The load number, the customer, the stops,
the appointment windows, the rate and the equipment come out as fields.
The extraction is treated as untrusted from the moment it lands, because it is a model
reading a scan. A field it cannot read stays blank — never guessed. You see what it found
before anything is saved.
→ A wrong appointment time is worse than a missing one. → It refuses to save an extraction with no stops on it. → Saved through the same validation as a hand-keyed load.
03
It answers the driver at 02:00
A driver messages in the middle of the night. It reads the thread with the truck, the
load and the next stop attached, and writes the answer a dispatcher would have written —
or decides it should not be the one answering.
It waits for the driver to finish typing before it forms a view. If a dispatcher has
already replied, it never speaks. If it is not sure enough, it stays quiet and the
message waits. If it thinks a person is needed, it wakes one.
→ Below its own confidence floor, it holds rather than guesses. → Every draft goes through the same fence as a human action. → Ships off. Four separate switches stand between it and a driver.
04
It can be handed the controls — inside a fence
Every capability in the product is one named, validated, audited operation rather than a
button hidden in a screen. That is what lets an AI agent do real work here instead of
drafting text about work: assign a load, open a claim pack, chase a document.
And it is why the limits are enforceable. Each operation carries a tier, the agent carries
a ceiling, and anything unclassified is treated as the most dangerous thing on the list.
→ Retries can't double-create a load. Idempotency is built in. → Every write names its actor and its reason, agent or human.
Coming next
The calls make themselves.
The single largest block of hours in a dispatch office is not thinking. It is the phone:
check calls, chasing an ETA, asking a broker whether a posted load is still there and what
they will really pay for it.
A voice agent is in build now. It will call the brokers behind your DAT postings, make
the driver check calls, and reach a driver who has not answered a text — in your
company's name, on your templates, inside exactly the same fence everything else obeys.
It gathers and it reports. It does not commit you to a rate, book a load or promise a
customer anything. Anything touching a customer or money is the top tier of the fence
below, and that tier is never automatic. A person still says yes.
Outbound · load board In build
Agent
Morning — calling about the reefer you have posted, Laredo to Atlanta, picking up tomorrow. Is it still available?
Broker
It is. Thirty-nine hundred.
Agent
We have a reefer sitting empty in Laredo from six tomorrow morning, so we could cover it same day. Is there room at forty-two?
Broker
I could do four thousand even if you can confirm this morning.
Agent
Understood. I'll put four thousand in front of dispatch now and come back to you inside the hour.
Logged to load 41903 · empty truck matched from the board · rate held for review No commitment given — money always requires a person
Recording and transcript keptEscalates to a human on request
Live today
Paperwork reading and the AI driver reply
The two paths that actually run a model, working now on real fleets, every decision logged and reviewable. The overnight triage beside them is deliberately rules, not a model.
Shipping
In build
Voice agent — load board calls
Calls the broker behind a posting, confirms availability, tests the rate, reports back. Never commits.
Next
In build
Voice agent — driver check calls
The routine “where are you, are you loaded, what's your ETA” round, made at the right hour and written straight onto the load.
Next
Planned
Voice agent — appointments and detention
Calling a receiver to move an appointment the clock can no longer make, and following up the detention nobody billed.
Planned
Yours
Whatever your operation actually repeats
If your people do the same call fifty times a week, tell us. That is the kind of thing this is built to take off them.
On request
The boards that pay for it
Most of what a fleet loses, it loses quietly.
None of this is new data — it is already in your ELD, your TMS and your reefers.
It has simply never been put next to itself.
ELD · TMS
Detention, billed
Arrivals and departures are recognised from the truck's own position — nothing to draw, nobody to ask. Every stop long enough to charge for, with the customer and the load it sat on.
TMS
Paperwork & billing chase
Delivered loads with no POD, no BOL, no rate con — aged, ranked by dollars outstanding, ready to work through on a Monday morning.
ELD · TMS
Quoted versus actual miles
What the load was priced at against what the trucks actually ran. The lanes where you are consistently short show up as a pattern, not a hunch.
TMS
Empty trucks & coverage
Who is empty, where, and when they come free — against the dispatch capacity you have to cover tomorrow.
TMS
Customer scorecard
Revenue, miles, rate per mile, detention and on-time performance per customer. The conversation before a rate negotiation, in one page.
ELD
Idle burn & fuel
Idle events with the fuel each one cost, per truck and per driver — the number that turns an argument about idling into a fact.
ELD
Safety & coaching
Hard braking and driving events with their coaching state, plus open engine faults and driver-reported defects, per unit.
ELD
IFTA, as a spreadsheet
Mileage by jurisdiction, exported to XLSX on demand. The quarterly job that eats a week goes back to being an afternoon.
SHOP
Repair profile per unit
What each truck and trailer has cost you, and how often. The number you want in front of you before deciding whether to fix it again.
Integrations
Nothing gets ripped out.
Every connection is read-first and cached, and each one degrades quietly: an integration
that goes down takes its own board with it and leaves the rest of the app standing. You
keep your vendor relationships, your contracts and your data.
MV
Motive
ELD & telematics
Vehicle positions, driver hours-of-service clocks, open engine faults, DVIR defects, idle events with fuel burn, IFTA mileage by jurisdiction, and hard-braking events with their coaching state.
Positions
HOS
Faults
DVIR
IFTA
Safety
ER
EROAD
ELD & telematics
Live vehicle state for the whole fleet, per-driver HOS clocks and daily logs, and in-cab messaging — the backbone of the map and every clock on the dispatch board.
Positions
HOS
Daily logs
In-cab msg
CL
Carrier Lynx Fleet
Reefer telematics
Every Carrier reefer you run — assets, install state, setpoints and live telemetry — read through the portal's own sign-in, so it works with the account you already have.
Assets
Setpoints
Telemetry
CX
Coretex 360
Reefer management
The reefer manager grid — box temperatures, setpoints, active alarms and alarm history — polled continuously and cached, so the temperature board never waits on it.
Temps
Alarms
History
DAT
DAT
Load board & rates
Posted loads and rate-per-mile by origin state, lane and equipment type, pulled straight into the board your dispatchers already have open.
Loads
Rate/mile
By state
LT
Logytext
Driver messaging
Two-way driver messaging over SMS, MMS and WhatsApp — outbound from any alert, and inbound replies matched to the truck, the driver and the load they are running.
Send
Receive
Threads
WhatsApp
PT
ProTransport
TMS
Loads and trips: customers, divisions, stops, appointment windows, revenue, miles and truck assignment. This is what makes an alert about a truck into an alert about a load.
Loads
Trips
Customers
Revenue
OCR
Document OCR
Paperwork
Rate confirmations, BOLs, PODs, lumper and scale receipts — read out of PDFs and phone photos into structured fields you confirm before anything is saved.
PDF
Photo
Scan
Review gate
DOC
Document vault
Paperwork storage
Every rate confirmation, BOL, POD, lumper and scale receipt filed against the load it belongs to, searchable years later when a broker disputes one.
Rate cons
BOL / POD
Receipts
Searchable
WH
Escalation webhooks
Paging & email
Signed outbound calls carrying geofence alerts, price alerts, night pages and driver notifications into whatever you already use for paging, email or chat.
Signed
Retried
Logged
DA
Desktop agent
Windows client
A small client that registers a dispatch machine as a connected device — scheduled exports, on-screen load-number reading, screenshots for the record. One job at a time, per device.
Exports
On-screen OCR
Queued
API
Operations API
For your own tools
The same named operations the product itself runs on, reachable from whatever you have built in-house — with scoped keys, a hard ceiling per key, and an audit row on every write.
Scoped keys
Idempotent
Audited
Swipe
Control
Automation graded by what it costs to be wrong.
The reason most fleets won't let software touch a load is that nobody can tell them
exactly where it stops. Here you can read the whole fence on one screen — and every
capability ships switched off.
0
Watch
Reads. No side effects of any kind. Sees everything, changes nothing — where every deployment starts, and where many happily stay.
Always on
1
Act internally
Reversible, audited, nothing leaves the building. Opening a breakdown card, assembling an evidence pack, flagging a truck for the shop.
Your switch
2
Contact a driver
Fixed templates only, no free text, quiet-hours aware, capped per night. One acknowledgment so a driver isn't texting into the dark.
Your switch
3
Customer or money
Anything a broker or an insurer could quote back at you. Invoices, cancellations, commitments. A person presses the button. Always.
Never automatic
Swipe
Fails closed, on purpose
Any capability added later is treated as the most dangerous tier until somebody deliberately classifies it. Forgetting cannot widen the fence.
Every write leaves a name
An audit row for each change, naming who did it — person, agent or the system — and the reason. Retries can't double-book or double-create.
Roles that match the floor
Roles are enforced on the server, not by hiding menus. And sessions survive a deploy, so nobody is signed out mid-shift.
Keys with a ceiling
Issue a key to your own tooling with named scopes and a blast-radius cap. Shown once, stored as a hash, revocable in a click.
Runs where you say
Your own hardware, your own cloud, your own database and your own backups.
Honest about its edges
Where a feed only covers part of the fleet, the board says so on the board. Partial data labeled as partial beats confident and wrong.
How you run it
Open a browser. That is the whole installation.
TransportAssistant is a web application. Your dispatchers are working in it the same
afternoon you say yes — nothing to install, no server to look after, no IT project.
For fleets whose customers or insurers demand that data stay in the building, the
identical product runs on your own hardware instead.
How most fleets start
The web app
Hosted, maintained and monitored by us. You get a link, your team signs in, and the board is already reading your fleet.
Live the same day — no hardware, no install, no IT ticket
Every improvement reaches you the day it ships
Backups, uptime and security patching are our problem
Works on any laptop in the office or at a kitchen table
One dispatcher or eight, on the same board, seeing the same trucks
The phone app
Add it to the home screen and it opens on its own icon, full screen, like any other app. The same board as the desktop — and critical alerts arrive as notifications, only for the trucks that person runs.
Its own icon on the home screen — no app store, no update to chase
The dispatch board, the map and driver threads, all usable one-handed
Critical alerts interrupt; the rest waits under the bell
Answer a driver from the yard, the shop or the sofa
What the owner checks at 11 p.m. without opening a laptop
Inside your own building
The identical product, installed on hardware you own and control. Nothing about your fleet, your customers or your drivers leaves your network.
Your servers, your database, your storage, your backups
Your own keys to every vendor — we never hold them
Answers the data-residency clause customers and insurers usually write in
We install it, and you can audit every connection it makes
Swipe
Built around your operation
No two fleets run the same way. Neither does this.
The switches below live in your own admin panel — changed by your people, in effect the
moment they save, no support ticket and no six-week wait. And where your operation needs
something genuinely its own, that is what we build. Tell us what your fleet does
differently; it is usually the reason you are still doing it by hand.
Night hours
When your night starts and ends — or run the watch around the clock if that suits your operation better.
Reefer tolerances
Allowable drift before it counts as an excursion, and a target per trailer, so ice cream and produce are not judged by the same rule.
What the night may do
Each overnight capability is its own switch, off until you turn it on, capped per night, logged either way.
Message caps
How many messages a driver may receive in one night, and how many the whole fleet may. Small numbers by default.
Quiet hours
When a driver may be contacted, when they may not, and who gets woken instead. Plus the wording of the one acknowledgment they get.
On-call rotation
Who carries the phone tonight, who escalates if they don't answer, and how long before it moves on.
Geofences
Draw them around your own shippers, receivers, yards and shops, at the radius you choose. Arrive and depart events follow.
Which trucks
Point the automation at the whole fleet, at a named list, or at everything except a few. Useful while you build trust in it.
Detention clock
How many hours are free before detention starts running, per your customer contracts.
Your integrations
Running an ELD or TMS not on our list? Tell us. Connecting one more system is work we already know how to do.
Questions we get asked
The eight things every fleet asks first.
Do we have to replace our TMS or our ELDs?
No. Nothing gets ripped out and nothing gets migrated. TransportAssistant reads the systems you already run and joins them into one board. If you drop us tomorrow, every one of those systems is exactly where you left it.
We run two different ELD providers. Does that work?
That is the case it was built for. Mixed fleets are normal after an acquisition, and most software makes you pick one. Trucks from every connected ELD appear on the same map, in the same alert list, with the same hours-of-service clocks, and the board says plainly where a feed only covers part of the fleet.
How long before we see our own fleet on it?
One ELD, read-only, is the whole setup. Your own trucks are usually on the board inside a day, with no hardware to fit, no device for drivers to install and nothing for you to configure.
Can it run on our own servers so no data leaves the company?
Yes. Most fleets use the hosted web version because there is nothing to look after, but the identical product installs inside your own network, on hardware you own, with your own database, storage and backups. Nothing about your fleet, drivers or customers crosses your firewall, which is what customer and insurer data clauses usually require.
What can the AI actually do without asking us first?
By default, nothing at all. Every capability ships switched off, and autonomy is graded in four tiers by what it costs to be wrong: watching, acting internally, contacting a driver, and anything touching a customer or money. That last tier is never automatic. Four separate switches stand between the AI and a driver, and anything not explicitly classified is treated as the most dangerous tier.
Does it work on a phone?
Yes, and it is the same board rather than a cut-down one. Add it to the home screen and it opens on its own icon. Critical alerts arrive as phone notifications, scoped so a dispatcher is only woken for the trucks assigned to them.
We are a reefer carrier. What happens when a load gets claimed?
An evidence pack is assembled at the moment the alarm fires, not months later when the claim arrives. It holds the alarm, the setpoint and the readings either side of the excursion, the load and customer it was running under, and whatever the driver said about it. When the claim lands, you open the load and the pack is already there: sealed at the time, timestamped, and exportable as one document to send to the broker or the insurer.
How do you catch detention we are not billing?
From the truck's own position. A truck standing still at its next stop has arrived; when it moves off, it has left. Nothing has to be drawn on a map and nobody has to ask the driver. That runs against the free hours in your customer contract, you are warned while the truck is still on the dock, and every stop long enough to charge for is listed with the customer and the load it sat on.
Request a walkthrough
See your own fleet on the board tomorrow.
Read-only credentials to one ELD are enough to start. Your trucks, your clocks, your
temperatures, your customers — on the board, inside a day. Not a demo dataset, not a
slide deck, and nothing for you to install.