The Journey
HD Transportation has been moving specialized metal freight across Kentucky and surrounding states for years, building a reputation for careful handling and reliable delivery on flatbed loads that demand precision. With 80+ trucks and a customer base that includes manufacturers, steel service centers, and fabricators, they had grown into a serious operation — one where the limits of their old system were starting to cost them.
They were running on Trimble TMS, a platform built for general freight that never quite fit the way a specialized metal hauler thinks about pricing. Every customer had different rate tiers based on weight — a light coil hauled differently than a structural steel load, and the pricing reflected that. But Trimble offered no clean way to encode those weight-based structures. Dispatchers were either doing the math in their heads or pulling up side spreadsheets to confirm rates before booking. As the customer base grew, so did the manual burden. It was a system designed for a simpler operation, and HD Transportation had outgrown it.
The analytics situation was worse. When leadership wanted to understand profitability by lane, by customer, or by driver, there was no clean path to that data. Reports were either unavailable or required painful exports and manual manipulation. They were operating a large, sophisticated fleet largely blind to the numbers that should have been driving decisions.
The team came across Vektor at the Mid-America Trucking Show in 2024. The conversation started around rate calculation flexibility — could Vektor handle weight-based pricing per customer? — and grew into something much larger when they saw how the platform was architected around giving operations teams real access to their own data.
The Transformation
The decision to migrate was not taken lightly. HD Transportation runs dedicated customers on consistent lanes, and any disruption to those relationships during a system transition would carry real business risk. The team developed a deliberate, three-month migration plan built around a principle of zero customer disruption: they would move one customer at a time, verifying each setup in Vektor before deactivating it in Trimble.
