Freight Visibility Gets a Second Set of Eyes

freight visibility meant knowing where a given truck was, but the industry has only gotten more complex as it has digitized. On a recent episode of FreightWaves’ What the Truck?!?, host Malcolm Harris pressed Andrew Wimer, Associate General Manager, Transportation Management at Descartes, on how visibility metrics have evolved as shippers, carriers, and brokers demand a fuller picture of what’s happening with a load. 

Wimer, who oversees the Descartes MacroPoint visibility platform, said the fundamentals haven’t gone away. “It’s always been ‘Where’s my truck?’ or ‘Where’s the load? Where’s the freight?’” Wimer said of visibility’s original mandate. “That’s still essential. Don’t get me wrong. You need to know where your freight is or where your truck is.” 

But Wimer argued the industry’s reliance on electronic logging devices has created blind spots that go beyond simple location pings, and that closing those gaps means rethinking who gets a voice in the tracking process. 

For years, Wimer said, the industry treated ELDs as the definitive answer to tracking, fraud prevention, and driver accountability. That approach, according to Wimer, sidelined the drivers themselves. “There’s a massive network of millions of drivers who are very good drivers, who are reliable drivers, and who are safe drivers, and when they’re removed from visibility, they don’t have the ability to help validate shipment status,” Wimer said. 

Validation covers everything from confirming a delivery to speeding up paperwork. Drivers who stay engaged with a tracking app can flag when they’ve arrived at a dock, upload proof-of-delivery documents on the spot, or send updates that would otherwise require a phone call to dispatch. Removing them from the workflow, according to Wimer, meant losing that layer of real-time confirmation just as the industry leaned harder on ELDs as “the silver bullet” for tracking. 

The fix, however, is not to abandon ELDs. According to Wimer, “We need to bring the drivers back into the equation. We need to leverage ELDs along with the app within the driver community so that we can have the most robust dataset possible and improve our time to cash.” 

That philosophy is the foundation of Descartes MacroPoint ELD+: to run ELD and mobile app tracking on the same shipment simultaneously, rather than forcing brokers to choose one data source over another.  

“We’re combining the two data sources together,” Wimer said. “We’re tracking the ELD, the truck, and the driver so that you can have continuity over the tracking session.” 

The redundancy is the point. If a driver’s phone loses signal, or an ELD provider’s API goes down, the other data source keeps the shipment visible instead of leaving a broker or shipper with a blind spot in the timeline.  

“If there’s a gap in connectivity or signal or for whatever reason there’s an issue with one of the devices, the other one’s still picking up data and fulfilling any gaps in visibility so you can provide your shippers with good customer service and meet your compliance metrics and scorecards,” Wimer said. 

Under the hood, Descartes MacroPoint no longer picks a single best identifier to track on a shipment. It tracks all of them at once, on one session, and feeds it all back to the transportation management system. “We’re tracking them all on a single session,” Wimer said. “We’re sending it all back to the TMS.” 

Beyond redundancy, Wimer said the dual data streams give brokers and carriers a new tool for spotting trouble. When a truck’s ELD and a driver’s phone stop telling the same story, that divergence itself is a signal.  

“Truck and driver should be telling the same story, moving down the highway together,” Wimer said. “If they go separate ways or signals go different directions, that should set off an alert and an operational workflow to call and investigate.” 

A mismatch doesn’t always mean fraud, but it’s worth a phone call.  

“If something odd is going on, get after it before it’s too late,” Wimer said. He pointed to a broader pattern the industry has had to reckon with over the past year: bad actors spoofing location data on both ELDs and driver-facing apps. “There’s spoofing of both ELDs and of the mobile app across any platform,” Wimer said. “Having multiple signals to help validate fraud and give you more data to then go out and talk to carriers is very important.” 

There’s one specific scam that brokers run into often: a carrier selling a team-driver service (with two drivers alternating behind the wheel to keep a truck moving around the clock) while actually running solo, a bait-and-switch that can show up as a single phone number covering a load that should have two. Wimer, who spent time on the brokerage side of the business before joining Descartes, said he’s seen it firsthand. Tracking multiple sources of data, he said, is an excellent way to catch issues like that as they occur.  

Rolling out the new ELD+ feature, Wimer said, required no new lift from Descartes’ TMS partners or the brokers using them. Using Descartes Tai TMS as an example, Wimer explained that a broker’s existing driver information (including phone number, truck number, and trailer number) flows automatically into Descartes MacroPoint to kick off tracking, and the solution handles the rest internally.  

“ELD plus just starts off the bat,” Wimer said. “There’s nothing extra a customer needs to do.” 

That’s a deliberate design choice rooted in how Descartes manages its relationships with the TMS providers that feed MacroPoint driver data.  

“We don’t want to add complexity to what a TMS has to send to MacroPoint to take advantage of additional features,” Wimer said. “We want to handle that within the application ourselves, so that customers don’t need the TMS to do anything additional to reap the value from it.” 

The scale behind that promise, Wimer said, comes from roughly two decades of building out the MacroPoint driver network.  

“We’ve been building a driver network for roughly two decades,” Wimer said. “We’re talking millions of unique drivers on the network, with their cell phones. They’re ready to track.”  

On the ELD side, MacroPoint has spent nine years building out telematics integrations and now connects with more than 500 ELD and telematics providers globally. Wimer said that Descartes has worked to maintain the network carefully so tracking doesn’t break down over vendor disputes.  

Asked what shippers, carriers, and brokers should do first if they suspect their visibility still has gaps, Wimer pointed to the data brokers put into their own systems at the moment of dispatch.  

“The first thing would be ensuring that you are working with your brokers on the floor to get full driver information. That’s the biggest gap we see,” Wimer said. 

Wimer said he recognized the temptation to cut corners on driver data firsthand, from his own time working as a broker under deadline pressure. That habit, multiplied across an industry, is what still undermines visibility tools no matter how many data sources feed them, Wimer said.  

“Getting accurate and good driver information in your TMS is still the biggest hurdle that I see our customers have,” Wimer said. “It starts with a good phone number. It starts with a good truck number or trailer number in the TMS so that then we have something accurate to track against.”

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