Dispatcher

The word means two jobs.

At a carrier, the dispatcher books loads for the trucks, from load boards, brokers and direct customers, and keeps them moving: who drives what, whether the hours of service allow the next pickup, what the driver should do when the receiver will not unload him. At a fleet of five trucks the dispatcher is the business; at five hundred it is a department with planners, a customer service desk and a night shift.

At a brokerage, the same title usually means operations: the person who builds the load in the TMS, sends the rate confirmation, calls the driver for status, updates the shipper, and sorts out detention, lumpers and the truck that broke down in Arkansas. A broker’s dispatcher may be responsible for thirty to sixty loads on any given day.

The two dispatchers talk to each other constantly, and the broker’s dispatcher often reaches the carrier’s dispatcher rather than the driver. That matters for tracking: a carrier dispatcher can answer for several trucks at once and is at a desk with a phone, while the driver is on I-40 with the phone in a cradle. Tools that contact drivers directly should let the carrier route those contacts to dispatch when that is how the carrier works.