CCJ Innovators profiles carriers and fleets that have found innovative ways to overcome trucking’s challenges. If you know a carrier that has displayed innovation, contact CCJ Chief Editor Jason Cannon at [email protected] or 800-633-5953.
Up until just over two years ago, Boardman, Ohio-based bulk carrier R&J Trucking ran on an operating system powered by an IBM AS/400 computer system. The company, which operates with over 600 company-owned trucks, 1,000 trailers, and 150 independent carriers, has now successfully built its own transportation management system in the cloud.
Mark Carrocce Jr., executive vice president of R&J, said the owners of the system gave R&J the source code needed to maintain and operate the platform before it was phased out in the late ‘80s or early ‘90s. This provided the company with more than 30 years of full control with an “extreme level of customization that really helped us thrive, so we couldn't afford to give up that flexibility.”
Despite its tailorability, that legacy system was limiting. Carrocce cited difficulty with integrations and generating reports, as well as the overarching problem of finding talent that could handle the upkeep of the “obsolete technology.”
“In 15 years, there might not be anybody left who ever learned how to write code within it,” he said. “It was just a necessary change to bring us onto a modern-day system.”
But there was no TMS on the market that met the company’s needs.
R&J Trucking is a subsidiary of American Bulk Commodities, which also owns bulk carriers Southern Haulers, John Brown Trucking, and DSI Bulk Transport. These carriers manage several lines of business, including a plastics division and a cementitious materials division.
“While they're both pneumatic, they operate completely differently from a billing standpoint and from a dispatch standpoint,” Carrocce said. “So, there was nothing out there that was going to accommodate all the different exceptions we've had over the years that our customers have been accustomed to us handling within all six or seven lines of business that we operate.”
Their options were to purchase a different TMS for each line of business, which Carrocce said would be messy and expensive; purchase one TMS for all lines of business and explain to customers that they could no longer oblige certain requests because the system wouldn’t support them; or build their own.
Building BulkOffice
When the time came to search the market for a new system, Carrocce sought help from a family member, Bob Sommer, who had a background in software.
Cue TwoSommers, a business modernization company that specializes in updating, migrating, and building applications and workflows with the Microsoft Power Platform. TwoSommers had created a cloud platform called Managed Application Services (MAS), which offers code generation features and full app customization capabilities.
When their search for a new operating system came up fruitless, Carrocce asked if R&J could build it on top of the MAS platform with the same flexibility the company was familiar with on the AS/400 system.
The result was the BulkOffice TMS. R&J worked with TwoSommers to create the system, which the developer took to market last year.
“The advantage we give to our bulk carriers is we give them a TMS out of the box, but the platform is built to allow our customer to modify it as well,” Sommer said.
Carrocce said R&J continues to build out functionalities—all of which would become available to customers of the system—which is designed specifically to meet the needs of bulk carriers, whereas many systems are designed for less-than-truckload (LTL) operations.
“In a lot of ways, those LTL systems are more complicated because that one load is really 20 different loads in their world,” he said. “I think a lot of that complexity that's involved in that aspect of it that a bulk carrier doesn't need, we took that bandwidth and used it to include features that are going to help somebody in the bulk world, instead of paying for a software where you don't need 50% of it.”
Designed for flexibility
Carrocce said BulkOffice gives R&J the flexibility to meet a limitless number of customer requirements without complicating internal operations.
“It works like any other TMS would, but I think the best thing about it is it allows you to deal with virtually any exception or odd little thing that a customer might need from the way that you bill the freight,” he said. “It's able to get very creative when the customer wants it billed one way, but this allows us to break it out on the back end internally so that we can do things how we want to on our end for organizational purposes, for financial purposes.”
For example, if a customer wants a rate quoted “all in” (base transportation plus all charges and fees), R&J can bill the customer "all in" while itemizing items like fuel, toll costs, accessorial charges, etc., internally.
This also helps prevent issues with driver pay – a key factor in driver satisfaction and retention. According to CCJ’s What Drivers Want survey, just under one-third (31%) of respondents reported having a pay discrepancy with their fleet in 2025.
As a bulk carrier, R&J pays drivers a percentage of the load rather than cents per mile, which is more commonly used in LTL. Carrocce said most developers aren’t aware of the difference in pay structure when creating platforms marketed to trucking companies.
That is a checkmark on the "pros" list for BulkOffice, he said, because it’s built from the perspective of a trucking company employee.
“This is all coming from people who have dealt with these issues hands-on, every day for a long time,” he added.
Built-in benefits
Beyond driver and customer satisfaction, R&J Trucking has experienced a bevy of additional benefits over the past two years of using BulkOffice.
In no particular order, these include operational efficiency, a reduction in manual workload, greater visibility, and more.
Carrocce said it’s easier to run reports of any and every kind.
“It has made it so valuable information is a lot more accessible to more people, more easily,” he said. “If you know how to operate a computer, you can pretty much get any report you want, and we're continuing to kind of build on that functionality.”
Carrocce said it has also increased visibility into loads as well as historical rate data. In addition, he said it has enabled delegation of rate entry beyond the billing manager and streamlined the billing process.
He said the company will look at potentially accelerating driver pay in the future because the system allows drivers to electronically send paperwork instantly back to the office.
“I think we're really just at the tip of the iceberg at this point... There are a lot of things that we're continuing to develop,” Carrocce said, adding that moving to a cloud platform is a key step in opening the door to the company’s ability to leverage AI across its operations, from billing and truck routing to customer service.
The CCJ Innovators program is sponsored by Comdata, Mack Trucks, and Shell Rotella.
