Tech provider rolls out a new TMS for bulk carriers

A new transportation management system designed specifically for the bulk commodity trucking industry has hit the market.

BulkOffice is an out-of-the-box TMS for bulk carriers. It is an end-to-end solution, automating processes including dispatching, invoicing, billing, fuel schedules and settlement.

It’s also built with the ability to customize functions based on companies’ individual needs like how they pay drivers or how they invoice.

“All these bulk carriers have different sets of customers, and every single customer has very unique requirements,” said Bob Sommer, an owner at TwoSommers, the software company that runs the cloud platform BulkOffice is built on. “We have EDI customers that have very specific ways they do EDI that we have to customize to fit exactly how they want it. We have over 2,000 different fuel surcharge schedules. Each of those schedules is unique to what the customer wants, and many of those schedules are very complex in terms of how the fuel gets calculated.”

Sommer said many trucking companies have multiple operating companies, and this TMS allows them to all operate on the same cloud-based system.

TwoSommers’ AI-ready MAS development platform is powered by Microsoft Power Platform. The platform gives companies the ability to build apps safer and faster by eliminating coding, cost and complexity, Sommer said. He said the TwoSommers platform can be applied to any industry.

“The way to think about our platform is it's a big sandbox where you can write your apps and have your developer write their apps but not have to worry about security, not have to worry about multi-company processing,” he said.

That’s how BulkOffice came to be.

How it started

Sommer’s brother-in-law, an owner of American Bulk Commodities, was looking to move from its legacy AS/400 to a cloud system and sought out TwoSommers to help him find the right fit across its four transportation companies: R&J Trucking, Southern Haulers, John Brown Trucking and DSI Bulk Transport.

“There was nothing that fit what he did. Part of the reason is because we just do bulk commodity hauling. We don't do any LTL,” Sommer said. “Mark was like, ‘Well, why can't we just write it on top of your platform?’ So we did do that, and now he's running a full cloud-native platform with four operating companies.”

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Now, TwoSommers is offering that system to other bulk carriers. While Sommer said the company may look into LTL in the future, the current focus is on bulk carriers.

The need for a different kind of system

Sommer said a lot of bulk carriers are running on legacy systems with no easy path to get off them, even when looking at the large TMS providers. That’s why they had to build their own in partnership with American Bulk Commodities.

“There aren’t really any modern TMS systems,” he said. “As far as the big guys go, like McLeod and TMW, they've been around for a while, but what we've come to learn is those guys are struggling mightily to take their old systems and move into the cloud.”

The only options are to stick with the old technology, eliminating access to taking advantage of new technologies associated with the cloud, including AI, or switch to one of the bigger providers who are trying but struggling to transition to the cloud.

“The problem they have in doing that is they built these big systems, and they built all these rules engines into them so they can accommodate all the different types of LTL carriers they work with,” Sommer said. “To convert that over into a cloud solution and at the same time still support their legacy base, that creates a pretty big cost structure for these guys.”

The other issue they have is the cost of maintaining two different staffs: one for the legacy system and one for the cloud. Sommer said that creates internal competition among employees because tech people typically want to work on the new technologies.

“While these guys are dealing with all this stuff, we have a solution that's already there,” Sommer said. “We’ve got a very unique solution for mid-market-size trucking companies in the bulk industry.”