Switching from a legacy drayage TMS

Why carriers put off switching

Most drayage carriers know their current system slows them down. They stay anyway, because the switch looks dangerous. What if a load falls through the cracks? What if a customer gets billed twice, or not at all? What if the drivers do not use the new app?

Those are fair worries. The answer is not to switch overnight. It is to switch in steps, with a clear rule for who bills what.

Step by step

1. Pick a cut-over date. This is the day DrayTech starts billing. Everything else is planned around it.
2. Load your master data. Customers and their billing contacts, delivery locations, rates and accessorial rules, drivers, trucks, and driver pay rules. This is the biggest part of the work.
3. Clean up addresses as you go. Old systems often have the same warehouse typed ten different ways. DrayTech keeps one profile per place, so suggestions are clean from day one.
4. Connect your sources. Point your delivery order inbox at DrayTech, connect your terminal logins and your GPS. From then on, new DOs are read automatically.
5. Run both systems side by side. For a short test period, your team works in both. DrayTech reads the same DOs, traces the same boxes and books the same kind of appointments. Compare the two and fix differences.
6. Reset and bring over open loads. Before go-live, clear the test board and bring in the real open loads from your old system, using exports or screenshots.
7. Double-check what was imported. Anything entered by a bot, mismatched, or missing a full address is flagged in red on the board until a person confirms it.
8. Put drivers on the app. Drivers install the DrayTech driver app and log in with their phone number. They can use it in their own language.
9. Go live. On the cut-over date, new work runs in DrayTech.
10. Finish the old system. Your old system bills its last loads, then can be turned off.

The cut-over rule: bill by delivery date

The single most useful rule in a TMS switch is this: a load bills in the system that is live on its delivery date.

• Delivered to the receiver before the cut-over date: billed in the old system.
• Delivered on or after the cut-over date: billed in DrayTech.

Only the delivery to the receiver counts. Dates for a pre-pull to your yard, a hub move or the empty return do not decide where a load bills. One clear rule means no load is billed twice and none is missed, and everyone on the team can answer the question without asking.

Running side by side

A side-by-side period lets your team learn DrayTech on real work while the old system is still the record. Dispatchers see DrayTech trace containers and book appointments on the same boxes they are already moving. Billing sees invoices draft from real deliveries. When something looks wrong, you fix the rule before it matters.

Keep this period short and focused. The goal is confidence, not running two systems forever.

What to expect from us

• Help loading customers, rates and locations
• Your billing and pay rules set up the way you run them today
• Custom reports or screens built during the switch if you need them
• A clear list of what DrayTech does automatically at your port, and what your team still does by hand

After the switch

Once you are live, the work you used to do in portals moves onto the shipment: appointments, tracing, holds and fees. Billing comes from the same data. Read how a Houston and Oakland carrier made the move.