Library — Freight and logistics
Freight networks that see around corners
Carriers, hubs and lanes behave as one network. Most freight software still reads it one shipment at a time.
01The problem
Tracking tells you where a shipment is. It cannot tell you what it is about to run into.
It does not know that the hub the shipment is heading for is filling up, that the carrier moving it has been slipping on this lane for weeks, or that four other shipments due at the same customer depend on the same connection. Each of those facts exists somewhere. None of them is connected to the others.
So freight teams work by exception — the late load, the missed collection, the difficult customer call — and spend the day on shipments that have already gone wrong instead of the ones about to.
The hard part was never knowing where a shipment is. It is knowing what is waiting for it.
02How it plays out
A regional linehaul carries freight from a hub to a cross-dock every night. On the tracking screen, tonight’s trailers are on schedule.
An illustrative sequence, not a customer account.
The signal
Over the past month, the carrier on that lane has been arriving a little later each week — still inside its window, so no exception has ever been raised. Meanwhile, inbound volume at the destination cross-dock is running well above plan.
What it means
Trajectory Intelligence reads the carrier’s performance as a sustained drift on this lane specifically. Theralon reads the cross-dock’s inbound volume against its dock capacity and sees it tightening by Thursday. And because shipments are held against the customers and connections they converge on, it shows that one customer’s weekly replenishment depends on the linehaul and the cross-dock together.
What is recommended
Move that customer’s freight onto an earlier departure for the rest of the week, ask the cross-dock to stagger appointments, and open a conversation with the carrier with the trend in hand. Each option is set out with its cost and what it protects.
What follows
The replenishment arrives on time. The carrier conversation, backed by evidence rather than anecdote, produces a fix before the drift turns into a missed delivery.
Nothing on the tracking screen was wrong. It simply could not see what the shipment was heading towards.
On your network
We'd show you the loads about to miss, before they do.
Bring us ninety days of loads from your TMS. Terra reads your carriers, lanes and docks as one network and shows you, on your own freight, what the tracking screen could not.
- The carriers slipping on each lane, ranked by what they carry
- The docks that will back up, a week ahead
- Every customer a late linehaul reaches, and what each one charges back
A screen from Terra, on synthetic data.
03Where Theralon applies
- 01
The network as a graph
Carriers, hubs, facilities, lanes and shipments held as connected objects, every relationship carrying its own measures and history.
- 02
Carrier drift
How each carrier normally performs on each lane, and a flag when that performance starts a sustained decline — before it becomes a pattern of failures.
- 03
Hub pressure
Inbound volume, dwell and capacity read together, so a hub tightening is seen before it becomes a bottleneck.
- 04
Exposure by customer
Shipments that converge on one customer or one connection grouped, so a single late linehaul is seen for everything it affects.
- 05
Planned against actual
Shipping notices reconciled against receipts, so shortages and disputes arrive as data rather than as phone calls.
04What changes
Working the shipments that already failed
Working the ones about to
Carrier performance reviewed after the quarter
Carrier drift seen as it starts
One late load, one alert
One late load, and everything it reaches
05Under the hood
A single facility touches hundreds of other objects. Rather than drawing all of them, Theralon surfaces the few relationships that matter and states plainly what is at stake in each. Data a source carries that nobody planned for — a dwell time, a fuel surcharge, a damage count — is put to use rather than dropped.
Two questions
- When a load starts running late, does anything tell you which appointments and customers it will hit before the miss?
- If a carrier you rely on dropped out for a week, could you see today what that would cost you?
Terra does both. See it on your lanes.
Show us where the operation breaks down. We build around your data, your systems and how you actually operate, at whatever size the operation is. Then compare it with what you run today.
There's no cost while we work with you, for the foreseeable future. You see what the software does on your own operation before it costs you anything.
When it has shown its value there, we agree terms with you, sized to what you run, and nothing becomes a contract until you agree to it.