The three numbers your TMS shouldn't guess

Most small fleets run on numbers somebody typed in

The dispatcher texts the driver to find out where the freight is. The quote is priced on a mileage figure from a car map. Settlements are paid on whatever number ended up on the load. Hours of service are a question you ask over the phone. Detention doesn't get billed, because nobody wrote down when the truck got to the dock.

None of these numbers need to be guesses. A routing engine built for trucks already knows the miles. The ELD bolted under the dash already knows where the truck is and how long the driver has been on duty. LoadHive connects to both and pulls those numbers straight in. The integrations aren't the feature. They're what makes the quote, the dispatch call, the invoice and the IFTA return hold up.

Truck miles are not car miles

A car map will happily route a 13′6″ trailer under a 12-foot bridge, and it will hand you a mileage figure nobody in freight will pay on. PC*Miler, from Trimble Maps, computes practical, truck-legal miles. It routes around low clearances, weight limits, roads closed to trucks and hazmat restrictions. Shippers, brokers and carriers already use that number as the basis for rates and pay, so LoadHive uses it too.

Every mileage figure says where it came from

Each load records the source of its miles: PC*Miler, Google Maps, or entered by hand. That source shows wherever the miles show. Nobody has to wonder whether a settlement was paid on real miles. Each quote revision also keeps a record of the routing call behind it. If Trimble couldn't match a street address and had to fall back to city, state and ZIP, LoadHive shows you a warning and tells you which stop it was.

When it can't route, it says why in plain words

A failed lookup never ends in a stack trace. Each kind of failure gets its own message, and the quote can still be finished on manual mileage:

Tolls are your call

PC*Miler returns a toll figure for the route. Each company decides what LoadHive does with it: show it for information only, add it to the expected carrier cost, or pass it through to the customer.

What you need: your own PC*Miler (Trimble Maps) API key with Route Reports enabled. Connect it in Settings. Without a key, LoadHive falls back to Google Maps or to the miles you type in, and the load is labelled with that source.

Tracking that comes from the truck, not from phone calls

If your fleet already pays Samsara for ELDs, you've already paid for most of a tracking system. You click Connect under Settings → Integrations, approve LoadHive from inside your own Samsara org, and that's the setup. LoadHive doesn't sell hardware and doesn't ask you to switch.

• A real sign-in, not a pasted password. The connection uses Samsara's own app authorization (OAuth), so LoadHive never stores a token that someone copied out of your dashboard and that never expires. If your company won't install third-party apps, a personal API token still works as a fallback.
• The right region. A Samsara account lives in the US, the EU or Canada. LoadHive asks which one when you connect, because the token can't tell us.
• Drivers and trucks matched on hard facts. Samsara drivers and vehicles are matched to LoadHive's by CDL number, VIN, plate and phone, never by name. An admin can apply, unlink or import each match. Anything unmatched is shown as not mapped instead of quietly dropped. The drivers screen has a from Samsara tab, so you don't retype your roster.
• Every five minutes, LoadHive pulls each driver's remaining hours and each truck's position. The position shows up on the live fleet map, on the load, and on the tracking link your customer opens.

Bad data never overwrites good data

ELD feeds have gaps. A request times out, a value comes back empty for one cycle. LoadHive only updates what the ELD actually reported. If a value is missing, the last good reading stays in place. Anything older than three sync cycles is labelled stale instead of being shown as current. And missing hours are shown as Unknown, never as zero:

Motive is next, on the same model

Plenty of small fleets run Motive (formerly KeepTruckin) rather than Samsara. The Motive connection is built and being tested against a live Motive fleet. It is not released yet, and we'll announce it when it is. When it ships, it will work the way the Samsara connection does:

• Connect from inside your own Motive account. A connection card will tell you in plain words if something is wrong, like an expired sign-in, a permission that hasn't been granted in Motive, or a feature your Motive plan doesn't include, and give you a Reconnect button.
• Drivers and vehicles matched on the same hard keys as Samsara, never on names.
• Hours of service read from Motive's drive, shift and cycle clocks, so the best-fit driver list works the same whichever ELD you run.

Under the hood, both ELDs feed the same place. Each driver and truck in LoadHive records which ELD it belongs to, and the sync runs separately for each provider. A fleet that runs both can't end up with one driver's hours on another driver's record just because the two systems happen to use the same ID.

One load, start to finish

Here is where each number shows up in a load's life, and which system supplies it.

Try it: who should take the 6 a.m. pickup in Joliet?

The best-fit driver score is 60% proximity to the pickup and 40% hours remaining. It returns the top three, each with the one-line reason it was ranked there. Switch the ELD off to see what the same screen looks like when it's working from guesses.

Where the AI is, and where it isn't

HiveMind AI is the intelligence layer in LoadHive's Pro plan. It covers two very different kinds of work, and we think you should know which is which.

No model decides who hauls your freight. The scores are arithmetic you can read, each with the sentence behind it, so a dispatcher can see why and overrule it. That's the point: a suggestion you can check is one you can trust.

Frequently asked questions