Family-owned software company TwoSommers recently upgraded its BulkOffice transportation management system with a new planning application designed to eliminate spreadsheets and give time back to dispatchers.

The BulkOffice TMS Planning app solves the planning problem—dispatchers planning hundreds of loads across a stack of spreadsheets and burning through time manually, ensuring all loads are covered while dealing with exceptions, the company reported. The app compresses planning time down to “minutes” and gives dispatchers visibility across all loads and drivers.

“We built it to operate the way dispatchers actually work,” Zach DeBernardo, a TwoSommers engineer, said in a news release. “The system catches the problem, shows you what’s wrong, what it recommends, and you decide. Nothing moves without a person saying yes.

“And nobody should have to plan a day out of a spreadsheet again.”

At the heart of the app is a drag-and-drop planning board. Every driver appears on a timeline that shows driver locations and work hours so a carrier can schedule everyone across all shifts. A dispatcher simply drags a load onto a driver and the system builds the full plan: out to the terminal for a trailer, to the shipper, loading, hauling, unloading, and back, with overnight rests added automatically when a trip runs long, TwoSommers said. Hovering over any load shows the key details for that dispatch. Clicking in opens the whole plan, step by step.

Right-click a load to find the nearest available drivers and trailers by equipment type to maximize utilization with ease.

Every plan is purposely pre-checked

The app addresses the most pressing questions: Can the driver reach the shipper before it closes? Will the trip put them over their hours of service? Does the delivery date leave enough time? When a load exception is encountered, the app flags it immediately and proposes a fix—turn it into an overnight load, move it to tomorrow, or start the driver an hour early. Carriers set their own rules for what gets flagged as an exception to eliminate problems like incorrect trailer type and commodity assignments. Customer site hours are part of the plan, too. Pickup and delivery windows are drawn directly on the schedule, so no one plans a driver to arrive at a closed gate.

An estimation engine built with the carrier's historical data powers the planning board. Deadhead time, loading, hauling, unloading, and arrival times are automatically captured, so plans can be compared to experience and adjusted as needed.

“Two carriers will never use BulkOffice Planning the same way, because no two bulk operations run the same way,” the company concluded. “Dispatchers can customize their displays to fit their preferences so critical data appears when and where they need it, including saved filters to quickly navigate commonly used data.”