Logistics routing 101 for tote freight

Our dispatcher routes about 15-20 truck-loads per week across the Ohio Valley. Here's the rough decision logic, in case you're curious how a small-fleet dispatch operation actually works.

Step 1 — bucket the load. Every booked load goes into one of three buckets: route-priority (a paying customer with a hard date), flexible (paying customer with a flexible window), or backhaul-target (a destination we want a return load from).

Step 2 — match to existing routes. Any route-priority load gets a truck dedicated. Then we look at flexible loads and try to fit them on the same truck or on a backhaul of an existing route. A flexible load that fits a backhaul is the cheapest possible quote.

Step 3 — fill the truck. If a dedicated route truck is going out 60% loaded, we look at the LTL inquiries and see if any of them fit. Sometimes a customer who would have paid LTL rates ($45/tote) gets routed onto a near-dedicated truck for a bigger discount.

Step 4 — check driver hours. Federal hours-of-service rules cap drivers at 11 hours behind the wheel and 14 on-duty per day. A dispatcher who ignores this gets a driver fined and a lawsuit. We track this in our scheduling software, but it's also intuitive — a 600-mi round trip needs an overnight or a different truck.

Step 5 — check for backhaul opportunities at the destination. Once the outbound load is set, we look for return loads near the destination. Either an existing buy-back commitment, a planned LTL pickup, or sometimes a "we know there's a brewery near there with empties — let me email them today" cold reach.

Step 6 — book and confirm. Once the route is set, the customer gets an email with a 90-minute pickup window and a date. The driver gets the route in their tablet the morning of.

Step 7 — track. We don't have fancy real-time GPS, but we do call the driver mid-route to confirm progress. About 90% of routes complete on schedule; the rest get a customer call as soon as we know there's a delay.

This is unglamorous and largely unautomated. We've looked at routing software (we tried a popular cloud TMS for six weeks); it didn't beat our dispatcher who's been doing this for 20 years. Maybe at 5x the volume it would. For now, the human routing wins.