The Journey
Tiflis Transportation didn't start with a TMS. They started with a navigation app. In the early days, when the fleet was small and the Chicago operation was still finding its footing, the product that caught their attention was Vektor's Trucker Navigation — a purpose-built routing tool for commercial trucks that understood bridge clearances, weight restrictions, and HazMat routes the way consumer GPS never would. It was the kind of tool that saved a driver from a bad decision at 2am on an unfamiliar state route. For a company-owned fleet just getting established, that kind of reliability on the road mattered more than any back-office software.
Growing from 15 trucks to 30, and then beyond, exposed every gap that a small fleet can paper over with effort. Manual load entry works when one dispatcher handles five loads a day. It breaks when the same dispatcher is staring down twenty. Billing reconciliation that used to take an afternoon starts consuming days. Driver schedule conflicts that could be managed over the phone become coordination problems that need a system. Tiflis hit every one of those inflection points in sequence, and each time, the answer was the same: they needed more from the platform they were already on.
The Vektor relationship deepened because the foundation was already there. The team at Tiflis wasn't shopping for a new vendor — they were asking their existing vendor for more. What they found was that the same company that had built the navigation tool they trusted had also built a full carrier TMS: AI-powered load entry, driver management, automated billing, money code handling for fuel. The features they needed existed. The decision was less a vendor evaluation and more a recognition that they had been using only a fraction of what was already available to them.
The Transformation
Full TMS adoption at Tiflis happened in layers, tracking the growth of the fleet itself. AI Automations landed first, and the impact on the dispatch team was immediate. Incoming load tenders that previously required a dispatcher to open each email, parse the details, and key the load into the system were now being handled automatically. The AI read the tender, extracted the relevant fields, and populated the TMS without human touch. For a team that was managing more freight each month than the month before, this wasn't an optimization — it was the only way the headcount could stay rational as the fleet grew.
