Why freight visibility needs a second signal

For most of the last decade, “visibility” in freight has meant knowing where a truck is right now. Carriers connected their ELDs and brokers and shippers plugged into telematics feeds. The industry mostly stopped relying on calling drivers to ask for a location. That shift eliminated an enormous amount of manual work, and it’s now table stakes. Brokers, 3PLs, and shippers expect real-time location data as a baseline. 

But knowing where a signal says a truck is located isn’t the same as knowing the load is safe, legitimate, and on track. Cargo theft losses hit an estimated $725 million in 2025, up 60% from the year before, according to Verisk CargoNet’s annual analysis, and the fastest-growing category is strategic theft, which includes tactics such as identity fraud, double brokering, spoofed emails, and compromised logins used to reroute or steal entire loads.  

A single tracking source, however reliable, was never designed to answer whether or not the signal was coming from the driver, truck, or load it claims to represent. A telematics feed can be accurate and still be attached to the wrong truck if equipment was swapped after the load was booked, or manipulated outright in a spoofing scenario. No single source is immune to that kind of exception. 

A second, independent signal 

Descartes MacroPoint’s answer is ELD+, a new dual source tracking capability that runs ELD and mobile app tracking within the same load-tracking session, rather than treating them as separate, competing methods of getting a location. The idea borrows a concept familiar from cybersecurity, an understanding that multifactor authentication works because it requires more than one independent factor to agree before a system extends trust. ELD+ applies the same layered-validation logic to freight visibility by bringing the telematics feed and the driver’s mobile device into a single tracking session as two independent location signals. 

Dual source tracking acts as a risk signal, not a final verdict. When both sources agree, operations teams gain more confidence in the shipment record. When they diverge, that doesn’t automatically prove something is wrong, but it does give a team a reason to look closer before a discrepancy turns into a bigger exception, or worse, a claim. 

Closing gaps telematics can’t 

The mobile side of ELD+ does more than provide a backup GPS ping. Because it runs through the Descartes MacroPoint for Truckers app, drivers can confirm arrival and departure milestones, capture photos and documents, and submit proof of delivery directly inside the same tracking session. Raw location data has limits. A geofence trigger, for instance, can tell an operations team a truck is near a facility, but it can’t confirm the driver checked in, and a location trail can show movement without ever producing the POD image a customer is waiting on. 

That has historically meant phone calls, email chases, and manual follow-up to collect the milestones and paperwork telematics alone doesn’t capture. Descartes MacroPoint OpsForce, the company’s suite of AI agents for freight visibility, is built to absorb that work by managing driver requests, follow-ups, and confirmations for missing milestones and documents so tracking teams aren’t manually chasing every gap.  

“AI innovations in our real-time visibility solution are designed to improve accuracy and responsiveness,” said Dan Cicerchi, general manager of transportation management at Descartes, regarding the OpsForce rollout. Since launch, Descartes says OpsForce customers have seen up to a 30% average increase in no-touch tracking automation and meaningful reductions in manual check calls. 

A layer, not a silver bullet 

Dual source tracking doesn’t replace all other forms of verification. Effective risk reduction is layered to include carrier vetting, identity and equipment validation, in-transit monitoring, exception alerting, and clear escalation paths. Those elements all have to work together, because no single control catches everything. As fraud tactics like double brokering and business email compromise have gotten more sophisticated, a layered approach has gotten more important. 

What ELD+ adds to that stack is a second, independent point of comparison sitting inside the same tracking session most operations teams already rely on. Conflicting geography between the telematics feed and the mobile app, or a mismatch that suggests equipment was swapped after a load was assigned, is visible much earlier, while there’s still time to ask questions. 

Built on an established network 

A two-signal model only works if both signals are actually available at scale, and that’s where more than a decade of relationship-building shows up. Descartes MacroPoint’s network includes more than 2 million drivers on its mobile app, more than 250 global telematics integrations, and roughly 3 million trucking assets connected for tracking. The hardest part of any driver-facing tracking tool is often getting a driver to download and use yet another platform. Because the Descartes MacroPoint for Truckers app is already familiar to a broad swath of the carrier community, ELD+ doesn’t ask operations teams to sell drivers on a new habit. It simply activates a second signal drivers are frequently already equipped to provide. 

The first generation of real-time visibility replaced the check call. The next one has to maintain continuity when a source goes quiet and give teams a second, independent reason to trust tracking data. One signal can say where a shipment appears to be, and a second can help a team decide how much confidence to put in that answer. 

To learn more about ELD+ dual source tracking, reach out to Descartes MacroPoint’s customer success team.