The 80% your TMS doesn't touch

If you found us through Logistics Technology Outlook, the profile you read makes one claim we want to show our work on. A coordinator typically handles 15 to 20 loads a day, even with a TMS. With Novari, coordinators have handled around 100, depending on the operation. The gap between those two numbers is the 80% in the headline, and this post is about where it goes.

Start with the arithmetic, since it is the part you can check. Assume an eight-hour day. At 20 loads, each load gets about 24 minutes of a coordinator's attention; at 15, closer to 32. At 100, it gets under five. Measured against the 20-load day, 80% of the time each load took is work Novari's system now carries.

Here is what fills those minutes: the tender email to the first carrier on the routing guide, the wait, the second email when nobody answers, the call to the next carrier, the appointment request to the receiver, the check call the afternoon before, and the note in the TMS once someone finally confirms. Very little of it needs judgment. All of it needs attention, because a missed reply becomes a missed pickup.

The 100 comes from live operations, and where yours lands depends on how it runs: how much freight moves on contract versus the spot market, how many of your counterparties answer by email, and how often loads go wrong. Some operations will land below it and some above.

A TMS does a great deal of outward-facing work, and with your largest carriers it does it well: EDI tenders, tracking feeds, a portal for the ones big enough to run one. Those integrations are worth keeping. Yet they assume the other side has a system to connect to, and most of the companies you depend on do not. Of the roughly 580,000 active US motor carriers, 91.5% run ten trucks or fewer (American Trucking Associations, June 2025).

So the follow-up lands on a person, and it grows with the number of loads rather than with freight spend. That is why the 15 to 20 holds even with a TMS in place. The TMS knows what is supposed to happen, and somebody still has to get the other company to confirm it. Counterparty Execution is our name for that work.

Novari's system sends each commitment request, watches for a confirmation, an objection or silence, reads what comes back and follows up on exceptions. Counterparties keep working the way they already do, by email, phone or text, and they know when they are dealing with a system.

That changes the shape of a coordinator's day. What reaches a person is the load that fell through, the appointment that failed, the carrier who wants a different rate: the cases that need judgment, authority or a relationship. That person can be your own coordinator or someone on Novari Desk, working your procedures. Either way, Novari never takes margin on freight, never holds your carrier relationships, and acts only for the party that hired it.

Put another way, the jump to 100 is the routine moving to the system and the same team spending its day on the loads that need it. Your best people on your hardest problems.

The same loop runs wherever another company has to do something for your operation to work.

Shippers use it to get carrier commitments confirmed and closed on the routing guide they already have. Novari for shippers

3PLs and brokers run it as an overlay on the TMS they already use, or as the system of record, so the same carrier team covers more loads. Novari for 3PLs and brokers

Purchasing teams will run it on purchase orders, ship dates and invoices when Novari Purchasing ships in January 2027. Novari for purchasing

Carriers get the mirror image: Novari Clear books delivery appointments from the rate confirmation, also shipping in January 2027. Novari Clear for carriers

The fastest way to find your own 80% is to look at one week of it. Book a 30-minute call and bring the commitments your team chased last week: the tenders, the appointments, the check calls. We will show you where the follow-up sits in your operation and give you a straight answer on whether Novari fits.

For the longer argument, read what Counterparty Execution is, and why you already do it by hand. For three customer results in detail, see same carriers, same contracts.