FreightTech innovations unveiled at TCA: tail lights to TMS extensions

Many companies have begun to time their announcement of new products with the TCA annual meeting. Some of them made pitches at the 2025 TCA meeting in Phoenix and were back with different offerings this year. 

Here’s a rundown of the companies and their products presented at this year’s gathering.

Trailer management tools from two companies

Tools for trailer management were introduced by BeyondTrucks and REPOWR. 

BeyondTrucks, in a prepared release issued in conjunction with the TCA presentations, described its tool as the Trailer Yard Module, targeted specifically at “private and specialized fleets.” 

“One of the most important evolutions we have seen happening today in the market is a transformation of the transportation management system from a system of records to a system of action,” Hans Galland, CEO of BeyondTrucks, said in his presentation at the press conference. Traditionally, TMS systems were built to have data put in to the, he said. But now, with technology developments, Galland said “we are able to manage fleets, technology sectors and structural management.”

A “system of management” is to “augment human productivity and decision making through multiple technologies and methods.”

Specialized fleets, he said, “have very specific, sometimes even custom-designed trailers,” Galland said. 

The company’s prepared statement said the Trailer Yard Module is integrated into the existing BeyondTrucks TMS.

Matt Harb, the vice president of product and engineering at REPOWR, said trailer repositioning for greater efficiency is “highly manual. It’s spreadsheets, it’s emails, it’s static dashboards. It’s trying to get disparate systems to kind of line up.”

REPOWR’s new product is the Trailer Optimization Platform (TOP), which it described in a prepared statement as a “capacity planning and repositioning automation solution.”

In that statement, REPOWR CEO Chris Hines said TOP, which will be released in the spring,  “lets operators set their strategy and then automatically execute it across their network without daily manual intervention.”

One presenter, two companies

Tra Williams is president and CEO of the FleetForce Truck Driving School in Sarasota, Florida. He’s also CEO of ParkPro, a company similar to the Truck Parking Club but with some significant differences.

“Virtually all of our locations are major event and retail venues, stadiums, arenas, malls, coliseums, civic and conference centers,” Williams said of the parking spots that can be accessed through ParkPro.

ParkPro used the TCA meeting to announce a deal with Amerant Bank Arena, where the Florida Panthers play in Sunrise, Florida, to offer what he said was “hundreds” of new hourly truck parking spaces, which can be secured using an app.

The question then is what is the difference between it and the Truck Parking Club, which has been around longer and does largely the same thing: take a slab of asphalt that is underutilized and turn it into truck parking whose availability would not be known except for the information shared on an app.

Williams said the ParkPro plan is to utilize only larger spaces in lit areas like what it has launched at Amerant: a parking lot that only gets used for Panthers games and other arena events, near food and other facilities. Truck Parking Club has those as well, but that product also features smaller offerings that might be tucked away somewhere not as visible. 

Williams also presented in his role as CEO of FleetForce. Its new product is to take its training program and offer it to private companies that need to grow their driver pool and do so by turning internal workers into people who can be behind the wheel. “Private fleets already employ capable, loyal team members,” he said, citing such workers as warehouse associates and forklift operators.” But for those workers to become a driver has a barrier to entry: the cost of training.

The idea then is for FleetForce to step in and train these workers in conjunction with the company that wants them to become drivers. “The cost of training and backfilling a warehouse associate or a forklift operator is significantly less than recruiting an experienced CDL driver,” Williams said. 

Hiding it from the bad guys

Rocci Marrari, the vice president of sales at Pedigree Technologies, introduced the Tail Light Tracker. It’s a GPS-equipped trailer light that does what lights are supposed to do but also has a GPS tracker in it should the trailer become lost or stolen.

And the GPS unit built into it has the advantage of being hidden. It’s built into a light on the trailer. The product, he said, is “designed to deliver reliable, real time visibility without a complex installation.”

It’s designed to avoid the problem of thieves knowing that GPS tracking is often carried out by a truck’s ELD. “So they will steal the unit, rip the ELD out and leave it wherever that may be, and continue on with the tractor or the trailer,” Marrari said.

Asked why a thief couldn’t just do the same for Pedigree’s light, Marrari said among all the lights on a combined truck and trailer, it would be close to impossible to figure out which is the one with the GPS tracker. 

Wex backs an award

WEX (NYSE: WEX), known mostly in trucking for its fleet cards and payment processes, is sponsoring the Harriet Tubman Award. It is awarded annually by Truckers Against Trafficking (tat). It’s a three-year partnership. 

Kylla Lanier, deputy director of external affairs at TAT, said WEX already HAD been supporting the group’s efforts, including training its own staff on how to look for signs of human trafficking within trucking activities. 

Matt Crumpton, a vice president at WEX, said the Harriet Tubman Award “recognizes individuals whose courage directly impacts victims of human trafficking. They’re real people who choose to act and whose actions change lives.” It’s often given to a truck driver or other transportation worker who spots signs of trafficking in their activities.

EpicVue offering more streaming bandwidth

EpicVue is offering a new service for drivers that will provide far more data capability for services such as streaming and gaming. It is partnering with authorized resellers of capacity coming off the Starlink satellite system. The added streaming capacity off a satellite means fewer dead zones where cell service is absent. 

The new service will be $99 per month for 225 gigabytes of data each month, CEO Lance Platt said at the news conference. “We’re able to bring a Starlink solution to the industry that hasn’t been made available,” Platt said. Hardware for the system is $249, he said.

A long-time name presents

McLeod Software is a venerable name in freight technology. Accompanied by legendary founder Tom McLeod, Doug Schrier, vice president of growth and special projects at McLeod, demonstrated just how long McLeod has been around by talking about changes in version 26.1 of the McLeod TMS. 

Impact Benchmark in the new software version, Schrier said, takes data from the vast network of users of McLeod software and creates benchmarks for companies to compare against. “It brings in a system of visibility and allows them to see where they rank in similar type companies,” he said of the new offering. 

The other new offering from McLerod is MPact.RespondAI which is designed to speed communication. Schrier said the product is being used by 20 customers and it has sped up communications with customers off the McLeod TMS by about 50%.

Fighting Freight Fraud

Tom Curee, the president of Qued, talked about a new partnership it has established with fast-growing carrier identity verification company Highway.

Qued is an appointment scheduling solution. It will team with Highway for what amounts to a double check on freight fraud.

Highway put out a prepared statement laying out what the partnership will do. “Qued automates freight appointments while authenticating each booking, enabling anytime, verified appointments that warehouses, brokers, and carriers can trust. When paired with Highway’s Carrier Identity platform, the result is a more secure and efficient freight workflow, from booking through delivery,” the statement said.

AI offerings

Two companies presented with AI-specific solutions. DataDis is a provider of technology to fleet maintenance operations. Travis Coffman, executive vice president of DataDis, said a new agentic AI solution would be specifically targeting the disparate invoices that can come into a company for what he said were “third party events,” like maintenance on the highway.

“What we’ve seen with our customers is that parts invoices aren’t too hard to deal with, but when you have those third party events, that’s a very cumbersome process to bring that data in house and get good quality on it,” he said. The AI tool rolled out at TCA will read those invoices, completing the work in seconds where in the past it might take 20 to 30 minutes, Coffman said. 

Meanwhile, Optimal Dynamics, which calls its offering the Transportation Decision Systems, introduced Scale.

Daniel Powell, the co-founder and CEO of Optimal the company, said the AI solution “helps proactively detect  network imbalances for a customer.” It can determine where in a company’s network it is short freight, and can “automatically fix problems for these carriers, go out and win business and talk to their customers.” 

Or as the company said in its prepared statement announcing Scale in conjunction with TCA, it is a “shared decisions system that continuously aligns revenue growth with utilization, service performance and profitability.”

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