“Easy to use” trucking software – The “X” factor when evaluating a TMS

Whether you have five trucks or fifty, no one has a team with excess time. Managing a growing business and balancing that with profitability means your team is virtually always at capacity, and you tend to hire when your team is over capacity. And, training new hires on your systems is a major endeavor when you’re a small business.

When done right, finding the right trucking software can be a transformative endeavor. Great software providers can open your eyes to what’s possible. There are always more efficient and effective ways to manage your business and your customers. Software, when done right, should be a huge unlocking function for your drivers, your dispatchers, your back office staff, and you as an owner.

“Truckbase is the most intuitive and easy software I’ve found after evaluating over 20 TMS providers. Any dispatcher can pick it up within 30 minutes.” -Tom Herlache, Owner of Herlache Truck Lines

But why do so many software implementations become overwhelming, time consuming, and frustrating with months of training? 

At Truckbase, we have always aspired to build the easiest-to-use TMS for small trucking companies. Period. We serve growing fleets that have a minimum of five trucks and span upwards of fifty. We believe great software lies in the art of balancing powerful features with simplicity.

Because Truckbase was specifically built with (and for) small family-run fleets, we believe advanced features are only as useful as they are usable for busy dispatchers and operations managers. After all, software is meant to save time (not add more work to your plate).

Trucking software often becomes too complex to use for several reasons:

1. Lack of focus. As a vendor, when you try to be all things to all people, such as building solutions for 3PLs and freight brokers in addition to carriers, the waters get muddied. Truckbase solely focuses on asset-based carriers. Even within the carrier segment, focusing on too many varieties – such as last-mile in addition to long-haul and over the road (OTR) – can lead to an overly complex product. Truckbase focuses on regional and long-haul carriers, who tend to have five to fifty trucks. We also don’t try to serve companies with 500+ trucks – that’s not our sweet spot, and there are other providers who serve mega-carriers better than Truckbase.
2. Too many screens, modules, and pages. For small teams, the power of a single dashboard that houses key data and intuitively allows you to follow active loads and easily toggle to other key sections is critical for helping onboard staff to the system. We routinely hear that Truckbase is like a TMS “on a single page.” That’s music to our ears.
3. Custom implementation vs. configurable. There’s a big difference between exceptional onboarding and customizing every feature to fit your needs. Do not be swayed by promises of customization – that means an incredible amount of work from your team to test and validate, back and forth with the vendor, and onboarding times measured in months instead of days or weeks. At Truckbase, we aim to have every customer onboarded within 2 weeks across 2 meetings (with additional training & support available of course!). 
4. Manual data entry. Too many TMSes seem robust on the surface, but without automations such as load importing and driver alerts, you end up spending just as much time inputting data and making check calls as you did when using more manual systems. Ask your providers how they leverage AI and what their unique advantages are when it comes to automated alerts and messaging. At Truckbase, we love that question!

You are too busy, and your customers and team members are too important, to be spending countless hours implementing, learning, and operating in clunky software. Focus on prioritizing ease of use when selecting trucking dispatch software for your growing fleet has cascading benefits.