Projects/Biomass Buddy
Booking truckload freight without leaving the inbox.
A dispatch desk for an industrial biomass and wood-products manufacturer: RFQs sent to the right carriers, bids read out of ordinary email replies, and the paperwork generated the moment a load is awarded.
- Client
- Musser Biomass & Wood Products
- Sector
- Industrial biomass and wood products
- Improvement area
- Freight booking and dispatch
- Status
- In daily production
Context
Musser Biomass & Wood Products manufactures wood pellets and shavings and ships them by truckload across the mid-Atlantic. Freight is a large, variable share of the cost of every order, and it is booked load by load against whatever capacity happens to exist that week.
The people doing the booking are a small dispatch team. They know the carriers, they know which ones run which lanes well, and they know roughly what a lane should cost. None of that lived anywhere except in their heads and in a very long email history.
The bottleneck
Booking a load meant emailing or calling several carriers, waiting, reading replies written in whatever form the carrier felt like writing them, and keeping the running comparison in a spreadsheet or in your head. Then the paperwork — rate confirmation, bill of lading, packing slip — was assembled by hand from the same information a fourth time.
Two things followed from that. Loads waited on a person being at their desk, and nothing about a completed booking was captured in a way that could inform the next one. The company could not answer a question as basic as which carrier had run a lane best over the past year without someone remembering.
What we built
- Carrier RFQs over email and SMSA load goes out to a selected set of carriers, with the lane, product and pickup window in the body of an ordinary message.
- Bids read from free-text repliesA carrier writes “we can do that one for 1,275 all in, pickup Thursday morning” and the system captures a rate, a date and an equipment type, with the original message kept alongside it.
- Paperwork generated on awardRate confirmation, bill of lading and packing slip produced from live data the moment a load is awarded, rather than re-typed.
- A shared team inboxOne mailbox that both the automated steps and the people work in, with notes, mentions and routing.
- Carrier history that accumulatesEvery completed load feeds lane-level history, so “who has run this lane well” becomes a query instead of a memory.
- A knowledge baseHow the company actually works, captured, searchable and cited — and still there when someone leaves.
Where it stands
Measured
- No baseline was captured before the desk went in, so we are not claiming a figure for time or freight cost. Establishing one is on the roadmap.
In useDelivered
- Carrier RFQ, bid capture and award running as the daily booking process
- Rate confirmations, bills of lading and packing slips generated rather than assembled
- Lane-level carrier history accumulating from every completed load
- A searchable knowledge base holding how the company operates
Human responsibility
The desk does the legwork; it does not award loads. A dispatcher chooses the carrier, and the original message sits next to every bid the system read so the reading can be checked. Anything that commits the company to a rate or a pickup goes through a person.
What could
run better?
Show us where work slows down, breaks, or gets stuck. We’ll help map the next move.
Thirty minutes, no deck required. We reply within two business days.