The driver side of the board
Home time on the board before the load is. A run sheet a driver can read at a fuel island.
Loads are only half of a week. The other half is who is out, who is due home, and what each driver holds in his hand when he leaves the yard. This page is that half.
The driver line
Days out, home time, and the promise behind them
Every driver has a line. It carries the unit he is on, the days he is out, and the days he is home. Home days are entered by the office when the driver's week is agreed — Thursday and Friday for a regional driver, a stretch of days for one who runs longer — and they show on the board in green before any load is placed.
Days out count forward from the last home day, so a dispatcher can see at a glance that Driver C has been out since Monday last week and is due back. A driver who has been out longer than the number of days your office set as his usual shows a marker on his line. The marker is information, not a rule; the dispatcher decides what it means.
Home days are a promise between the carrier and the driver. The board treats them that way: a load placed across a home day turns red, and moving a driver to another tractor carries his home days with him. A dispatcher can override a home day, but has to do it on purpose, by changing it, and the record keeps the change.
Any day of the week
Who is available on a given day
Click a day at the top of the board and the units with nothing on it that day are listed with their drivers, where each one will be the evening before, and how many hours your office has entered for him. That is the question a dispatcher asks most — who can take this Thursday load out of Tulsa — and it is answered from the board rather than from memory.
The list is honest about position. A driver delivering in Louisville on Wednesday is free on Thursday, but free in Louisville, and the list says so. If the Thursday load picks up in Tulsa, the deadhead is his problem and the dispatcher's, and it is on the screen before the phone call.
Drivers marked home do not appear as free. If a dispatcher wants to ask a driver to work a home day, that is a conversation, not a drag, and the board makes it a deliberate act by keeping him off the list.
Changing the plan
How a swap is recorded
Swaps happen. Two drivers meet at a truck stop and trade trailers so both get home. A driver goes off sick on Tuesday and another takes his tractor. A relief driver covers a week. Each is a swap, and each is recorded on the board where it happened rather than fixed afterwards from memory.
A trailer swap is entered on the two loads involved: the stop where the trade happens is added to both, with the time and the place, and the remaining stops move to the other driver's run sheet. Both sheets are reissued and marked as changed. A driver swap on a tractor is entered on the unit's line: the new driver's name from that day, his home days carried across, and the old driver's line left showing where he stopped.
The record keeps every swap as one line: who, what, where, when, and who at the desk entered it. When a customer asks which driver delivered on Wednesday, the answer is there, and it is the right one even though the week started with a different name on the board.
What the driver holds
What the driver sees on the run sheet
The run sheet is the point of the whole thing. It is one page per run, laid out to be read in a cab with the engine running, in large type, in stop order. It carries what a driver needs and leaves out what he does not: no rate, no customer contract number, no internal codes.
It prints from any office printer and goes out as a text to a driver's phone in the same layout. A driver without a smartphone takes the paper. When a load moves, the sheet is reissued with the change written across the top so a driver looking at the old one knows it is old.
Notes on the sheet are the dispatcher's words, written on the load, in the order the driver will meet them. Dock hours, a lumper fee to be paid on arrival, a gate that is locked after six, a receiver who wants a call from the road. Whatever the office knows and the driver should.
| Stop | Where | Window | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 · Pickup | Springfield, MO | Mon 06:00 to 08:00 | Drop and hook, door 4, keep the reefer at the set point on the bill |
| 2 · Delivery | Tulsa, OK | Mon 15:00 to 17:00 | Live unload, lumper on site, check in at the guard shack |
| 3 · Pickup | Tulsa, OK | Tue 07:00 | Live load, ask for the dock supervisor by name on the sheet |
Said plainly
Hours of service, as the carrier records them
The board shows driving and on-duty hours next to the loads they affect, and it shows the hours your office entered. It does not read the truck, it does not read the device in the cab, and it does not produce a log. If your office enters that Driver B has nine driving hours left on Tuesday, the board will flag a Tuesday load that needs eleven. If your office enters nothing, the board says nothing about hours.
We are not an electronic logging device and we do not keep the hours-of-service record of record. That record lives in the device in the cab and in whatever your carrier uses to store it. What we hold is a planning number, typed by a dispatcher, so the week is planned against something rather than against hope. The rest of what this software is not is written out on its own page.