Moving Beyond the Load: Redefining TMS with Network-Centric Intelligence | Loaded and Rolling

Thomas Wasson (0:14)

All right, everyone, welcome to Trimble Insight 2026 I'm Thomas Wasson, and we are at, I love this, the Barkcast booth driven by Fleetworthy. Shout out to everybody. If you can see on the corner here, we have an audience as well. Really fun event, but we're going to be driving into for our first conversation. We'll be talking with the folks from Midwest Carriers, more specifically, Drew Farrell. And, you know, Drew, as we dive in here, one of the cool things, of course, has been technologies to talk to the town, optimization, the whole shindig. But you all recently had published a white paper too. And so before I dive into that, let's get some housekeeping out of the way. Tell us a little bit about yourself, what y'all do.

Drew Farwell (0:54)

Sure. So Midwest Carriers, we're a refrigerated carrier located in Connell, Wisconsin.

We do primarily meat, cheese, things like that, just refrigerated. We have a shuttle operations. We also have a Osborne and Sun. So we do alcohol consolidation off of the coast and bring it back into the Midwest. So a little bit of diversity in the fleet as far as that goes and differing needs and really kind of drives what we need for the technology piece.

Thomas Wasson (1:22)

You got perishables and alcohol, which is a fun time until you have to transport it.

Drew Farwell (1:26)

Right, right.

Thomas Wasson (1:28)

So let's dive into that because you all wrote a white paper called The Next Generation TMS, From Load-Centric to Network-Centric Intelligence. Tell me about kind of the backstory behind what went into making this.

Drew Farwell (1:40)

Sure, one of the things Midwest has always been good about is understanding round trip costing. And so what we struggle with specifically is everything is done like one lane at a time.

So, but not all miles in trucking pay the same. So if I'm going from Wisconsin to New Jersey, I'm going to get a different rate than I am going from New Jersey back to Wisconsin. So there's no standard mile in the industry. So we were looking at different ways to understand the challenges that we face every day.

So one of the biggest things was for us specifically was trying to figure out with trailer allocations. So pools essentially, how to manage those, how to manage commitments to know what we committed to, how many we got, so we needed to know if we needed to ask for more loads after the last four years, or if we were going above our commitment and we needed to renegotiate price or look at different things for capacity that way. So it just became obvious that our current system did a fantastic job of getting us to where we're at. We're currently on TruckMate, but we were looking at like how enterprises function and just the level of detail that we were missing on a lot of these commitments. And so we actually made the decision to switch over to TMW Suite. So that's kind of the direction we're moving. In my opinion, if we do it, we should be able to model it in the TMS. If I can model it in the TMS, I should be able to plan it. So as we started looking at the differences between TruckMate and TMW Suite specifically, what we realized with our business and how it's changed is we're doing far more drop and hook than we used to. So when we used to be one to one on our trucks and trailers, TruckMate was a fantastic product that kept everything aligned. But what's happened is increasingly probably half of our business is actually equipment moves that aren't tied to loads at all, and we have no way in that system to be able to pre-plan that. So as our business has evolved, really the need for a more complex product has emerged.

Thomas Wasson (3:36)

I like that. We called that at US Express non-revenue pros, non-revenue moves, but the problem was, how do you build them, how do you structure them, how do you allocate them to show that is this lane, is this shipper really the one I need based on that equipment stuff? So let's dive into that as well, because I like your point about growing with the trailer pools, and I'm going to use a quote that I made back in my day. Trailers are like cigarettes in prison. You need them to get anything done.

Being a refrigerated carrier and doing alcohol, you probably have mixed types of equipment as well. Talk about what goes on behind the scenes on that. That's a wild ride.

Drew Farwell (4:11)

It is, and obviously you've got different maintenance requirements with the reefer than you do with the standard van. So it's not just the PM for the trailer itself. You have to maintain the equipment. You have to take care of alarms and things like that. So what we were really losing visibility to is I would have a trailer located literally across the highway, and I was counting on somebody to remember that that trailer needed to come over to me for maintenance. So what would happen? We'd be reacting, hey, the trailer got unloaded. Now what are we going to do with it?