Freight consolidation agent. Try it on your own loads.
Upload a week of shipments. The agent finds the LTL loads leaving your dock that could share one truck, keeps every delivery on its original day, and prices the saving against what you paid. It runs in your browser, so your file never leaves it.
- Every drop keeps its delivery date
- Priced with stop fees, not wishful math
- Your file stays in your browser
- LTLChicago, IL 606076 pallets$573
- LTLElk Grove Village, IL 600078 pallets$706
- LTLNaperville, IL 605405 pallets$537
From the sample week below. Fictional shipments, default rates.
Trusted by
Try it on last week's shipments.
Export last week's shipments from your TMS or ERP as CSV, drop the file in, and see which loads could have shared a truck. No sign-up, and your file never leaves your browser. No file to hand? Run the sample week.
Built for shippers sending 30 or more LTL shipments a week from a plant or DC: distributors, manufacturers, and suppliers to retail DCs.
Your loads
One row per shipment: pickup date, destination ZIP or city, pallets, cost. Download the template
Check the columns
The agent guesses which column is which. You confirm.
Your rates and rules
$2.50/mile · $75/stop · 3 drops · 50 mi
Defaults are planning assumptions, not quotes. Set your own.
What you get back
- 01Which shipments can share a truckSame dock, same pickup day, same delivery day, drops close together.
- 02What each truck would costYour rate per mile and stop fee, against what you paid for the shipments it replaces.
- 03What it left alone, and whyToo far apart, too big, or cheaper as LTL. Nothing is hidden.
- 04Whether the saving survivesThe same plan at two and four times the stop fee.
No file to hand? Run the sample week: 56 fictional shipments out of a Columbus, Ohio warehouse.
Location data © GeoNames, CC BY 4.0. Truck cost is road miles (straight line × 1.2) at your rate, plus stop fees; never less than the dearest shipment it replaces.
Nobody is slow. The loads are just never in the same place at the same time.
Most missed freight consolidation isn't a planning failure. It's structural: the shipments that could share a truck reach the dock through different people, at different times, priced one by one.
Different desks
Three customers in one metro are three orders, often entered by three people. Each is booked the moment it is released, so nobody sees them side by side.
Released too late
By the time the dock sees all of Monday's freight, the carriers are tendered. Consolidation has to happen between order release and tender, which is the window nobody owns.
Priced one at a time
LTL is quoted per shipment, so each booking looks reasonable. The cost only shows up as a pattern: the same lanes, half-full, every week.
Monday · LTL booked at the dock
Illustrative
| Booked | By | To | Pallets |
|---|---|---|---|
| 07:52 | Desk A | Detroit area, MI | 9 |
| 08:14 | Desk B | Chicago, IL 60607 | 6 |
| 09:03 | Desk A | Indianapolis, IN | 4 |
| 10:41 | Desk C | Elk Grove Village, IL | 8 |
| 11:20 | Desk B | Pittsburgh, PA | 5 |
| 13:05 | Desk A | Atlanta, GA | 1 |
| 14:37 | Desk C | Naperville, IL | 5 |
Three Chicago-area drops, 19 pallets, one delivery day, booked by three people across six hours. Each booking was reasonable. Together they were a truck.
84%
In a one-month diagnostic of 1,292 truckloads from a building-products plant, 84% of the consolidation saving sat across different orders, customers and towns. Those were merges no planner looking at one order could have made. The plant loaded its trucks well; the gap was visibility, not effort.
Six rules, written so a planner can check every truck.
A consolidation plan is only worth something if your dock would load it and your customers would accept it. These are the rules the test runs on, and the same ones the agent uses on live orders.
- 01
Same dock, same pickup day
Freight that isn't on the same floor at the same time can't share a trailer.
- 02
Same delivery day for every drop
No customer's order moves earlier or later to make a truck work.
- 03
Every drop near every other drop
Each drop must be within your radius of all the others, not just of the first. A 50-mile group can never stretch to 100.
- 04
Capacity you would actually load
Usable pallet positions and payload you set, with headroom. A plan that packs tighter than your dock does is a plan that overstates the saving.
- 05
Priced honestly
A truck costs road miles at your rate plus a fee for every extra stop, and never less than the dearest shipment it replaces.
- 06
Only if it's cheaper
Groups that would cost more as a truckload stay LTL, and the results say so. You also see the plan at two and four times the stop fee.
On live orders, the agent works the window between release and tender.
The test looks back at a week you already shipped. Connected to your systems, the same logic runs forward on today's and tomorrow's orders, early enough for a planner to act.
- 01
Orders are released
The agent reads orders, ready dates and pallet counts as your ERP and WMS release them.
SAPOracleNetSuiteManhattanBlue Yonder - 02
It proposes trucks
Before anything is tendered, it groups what can ride together and shows the drop order, the fill and the saving.
Your lane ratesDock calendar - 03
A planner approves
One look, one decision. Nothing is booked until a person says so.
Recommend-only - 04
Booked, then checked
The truck is tendered through your TMS or Orkestra's shipment booking, and the invoice is checked against the plan.
EDI 204 tenderEDI 210 invoice
What a pilot adds that a file can't carry
Your contract rates
The test prices a truck from mileage. In a pilot the agent uses your tariff and spot history per lane, so the saving is the one you would actually see on the invoice.
Ready dates and dock cut-offs
A merge only helps if all the freight is ready before the truck leaves. The agent reads ready dates and the dock calendar from your ERP and WMS.
Drop order and trailer type
On a rear-loaded box trailer the first drop must come off without moving the second. The agent sequences the drops and loads the trailer in reverse.
Appointment windows
Same-day delivery is the floor. Where receivers book appointments, the agent fits every drop inside its window or leaves the shipment alone.
Recommend-only to start
The agent proposes each truck with its reasoning and saving. A planner approves it, and nothing is tendered until a person says so.
Did the saving land?
Every approved truck is checked against the freight invoice, so the number on the dashboard is money that left the building, not a forecast.
Four ways to consolidate LTL freight, compared.
Most shippers already consolidate some freight. The question is how much of the week each approach can see, and when it decides.
| Planner + spreadsheet | 3PL consolidation program | TMS load builder | Orkestra agent | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sees orders across desks and sites | What one planner has open | Only freight sent to them | Orders released to it | Every order, from release |
| Delivery dates | Kept, if someone checks | Often a day at the cross-dock | Kept | Kept on every drop |
| Your carriers and rates | Yes | Theirs | Yes | Yes |
| Extra handling | None | A cross-dock touch | None | None |
| When the decision is made | After the week is shipped | At pickup | At load build | Between release and tender |
The agent doesn't replace your TMS or your 3PL. It sits on top of the orders and shipments you already have, finds the trucks, and hands them to the booking flow you already run. For the freight you can't consolidate, the freight audit guide covers the reweigh, reclass and accessorial charges worth checking on every LTL invoice.
Not ready to upload a file? Start here.
Questions we get on every call
Run it on 90 days of your real loads.
Bring an export. On a 30-minute call we run it with your contract rates, walk through the trucks it would have built, and show which merges your planners could book next week.