For decades, mid-market trucking fleets have grudgingly accepted a painful reality: Their transportation management systems handle about 80% of their rating needs. The remaining 20% demands spreadsheets, calculators and manual intervention. BeyondTrucks CEO Hans Galland calls this the “last mile problem” in coding. His company’s new AI RateAgents aim to solve it by letting carriers build custom rate formulas without calling a single engineer. The Limitations of Traditional Rate Tables Rate tables are the functions that price every activity a carrier completes. This includes miles driven, detention tickets, fuel surcharges and accessorials. Ultimately, these charges determine what appears on a customer invoice. The challenge is that every shipper structures pricing differently. “The carrier is at the behest of the shipper to accommodate those mathematical formulas in which they price their activity,” Galland said. “And so the challenge is really that built TMS functions are not exhaustive enough to cover all the gazillion permutations that exist in the market to calculate the stuff automatically.” window.googletag = window.googletag || {cmd: []}; googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.defineSlot(‘/21776187881/FW-Responsive-Main_Content-Slot1’, [[300, 100], [320, 50], [728, 90], [468, 60]], ‘div-gpt-ad-1709668545404-0’).defineSizeMapping(gptSizeMaps.banner1).addService(googletag.pubads()); googletag.pubads().enableSingleRequest(); googletag.pubads().collapseEmptyDivs(); googletag.enableServices(); }); googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display(‘div-gpt-ad-1709668545404-0′); }); One result? Carriers with 100 to 1,000 drivers feel trapped. They can automate most billing through their TMS, but a stubborn slice requires manual work. “So that leaves you, as you said, typically as a mid-market carrier, I can do 80% on TMS, but then there’s 20% I need to do in a spreadsheet or with a calculator,” Galland said. Legacy…
