Modern Transportation saves $5M annually with BeyondTrucks AI-driven TMS

Modern Transportation, a Pittsburgh-based bulk carrier operating 350+ drivers across 22 terminals in 13 states, faced operational inefficiencies across its chemical, liquid bulk, and industrial freight supply chains. Physical trip sheets and scale tickets were causing lost revenue from under-invoicing of payloads. Manual verification around accessorial pay, equipment compatibility, and dispatch assignments carried high costs and administrative time, including two to three hours weekly to calculate driver pay and customer bills. As shipment volumes scaled, manually applying fuel surcharges for even a single major customer — processed individually for roughly 50 shipments per month — became unsustainable.

In September 2024, Modern Transportation deployed the BeyondTrucks cloud-based, multi-tenant TMS across 20 of its terminals, replacing an on-premise system. The platform reduced administrative time for load building, dispatch, payroll, and billing while automating and optimizing operations management. BeyondTrucks integrated with Samsara onboard technology, Microsoft Power BI, Great Plains accounting, TMT maintenance, UKG workforce management, EDI systems, EBE Technologies enterprise process management, and Vector yard management software. A key integration with Breakthrough Fuel Recovery automated market-based fuel surcharge calculations — accounting for exact prices, timing, taxes, and geography — replacing reliance on inaccurate national or regional averages. The TMS also allowed Modern Transportation to upgrade its technology, including migrating its ERP to Acumatica, its ELD to Platform Science, and its payroll system to Paylocity.

Modern Transportation achieved approximately $5 million in annual savings following the BeyondTrucks implementation. Savings came from three sources: eliminated payload invoice errors that had been causing ongoing revenue leakage, reduced cloud hosting and update costs versus the prior on-premise TMS, and administrative time recovered across load building, accessorial pay verification, dispatch, and driver billing. Key operational improvements included:

• Fuel surcharge processing: scaled from ~50 manual shipments per month to hundreds of automated transactions per day
• Driver pay and customer billing: administrative time reduced; calculating driver pay and customer bills had taken two to three hours weekly
• Asset utilization: improved

The TMS also allowed the company to upgrade its ERP, ELD, and payroll systems.

• Closing revenue leakage from under-invoiced payloads often requires system-level automation — manual verification at scale is structurally unreliable.
• Integrating market-based fuel recovery tools (rather than national averages) directly into TMS workflows improves load acceptance decisions.
• Cloud-based TMS platforms create compounding savings: lower hosting costs and reduced bolt-on maintenance.
• A TMS migration can serve as a forcing function for broader technology modernization — ERP, ELD, and payroll system upgrades become tractable when unified data flows are already being rebuilt.
• Quantify administrative time per workflow cycle before implementation; it establishes a measurable baseline for ROI that compounds across a large driver network.