A customer is a lane, not a logo.
The account was signed in January and celebrated as a win. The revenue is thirty lanes, each with its own volume, award rate and margin, and eleven of them went to somebody else at the last bid. Sales reports the logo. The P&L reports the lanes. We build the system that reports both, without asking the TMS to become a CRM.
The TMS knows. The CRM never asks.
McLeod, Aljex, MercuryGate or Turvo holds every load, every rate and every accessorial you have ever billed. The CRM holds a company name and a next step. So a customer's volume can fall forty per cent over two quarters and the first person to notice is the analyst building the annual review, four weeks after the freight has already gone.
Volume leaves lane by lane.
Logistics — lanes and volumeFreight modelled the way it is actually sold.
Lanes as records, not notes
Origin, destination, mode, equipment, committed volume, awarded rate and the incumbent, modelled as objects under the account. A customer's revenue becomes a sum you can watch move rather than a figure someone assembles once a year.
Bid season run as a pipeline
RFP invitation, data due, pricing turnaround, submission, award and implementation as dated stages. Win rate by lane, mode and customer comes out of the system instead of out of a folder of workbooks named final_v4.
The TMS boundary drawn once
Loads, rating, settlement and documents stay where operations lives. The CRM reads shipment counts, revenue and margin per lane on a schedule and writes nothing back — so it never quietly becomes a second operational system nobody validated.
Carrier capacity is a pipeline too
Recruiting and onboarding carriers — packet, authority, insurance certificate, safety score, checks in RMIS, Highway or MyCarrierPackets — as stages with expiry dates that resurface before they lapse rather than at the moment a load needs covering.
Service failures the account team sees first
On-time percentage, detention, tender rejection and claims pulled from the TMS and from project44 or FourKites onto the account, so the quarterly review opens with the same number the customer was about to open with.
Quote to award, timed
Spot quote turnaround measured end to end: request in, rate out, accepted or lost, and why. The freight you lost was usually lost to a clock rather than to a price, and that is only arguable once it is recorded.
Pricing desk, then account team.
Sit with pricing and ops
One bid walked from invitation to award, and one week of spot quotes watched in real time. Where the numbers come from, who touches them, and what never makes it out of a mailbox.
Agree the lane model
What a lane is, what a commitment means, when an award is real and when it is a placeholder. The vocabulary is settled with the pricing desk before anything is built against it.
Integrate one direction
A nightly read from the TMS into lane and account level reporting, with the mapping documented. Prospects, bids and relationships live in the CRM; loads and settlement never leave the TMS.
Hand it to the desk
Account managers and pricing analysts trained on the reports they will defend in front of a customer, plus a quarter alongside them through one full bid cycle.
Everything ends up in the TMS.
It is the system everyone already has open, so prospects get typed into it, then bids, then notes about a shipper who has never tendered a load. Now the operational system carries records it was never designed to report on, and a customer who has not shipped yet is invisible to a tool that only understands freight that moved. The line is worth drawing and worth defending.
Send us your last bid season.
Tell us what you are running
What the system does today, where it breaks, and when it has to work. An engineer reads it — you get an answer inside one business day, not a sequence.