Larissa Lemke
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Reviews
101 reviews · average 3.5Bottom line: McLeod worked when everything else fell apart. During last winter's Nor'easter, when cell coverage and vendor portals were flaky, McLeod stayed responsive and dispatchers could still push updates and see real-time statuses. What really made me happy was the automatic failover and precise event timestamps - those two things stopped chargebacks and kept drivers getting paid on time. With fifty trucks, that kind of reliability kept lanes moving and the office from spinning. Not flashy, just dependable, and for running a fleet that’s tight on margin, that’s everything.
Last Monday a trailer showed an ETA of 10:00 AM in Navisphere, then flipped to 1:30, then back to 11:15, and by noon the system marked it delivered while our driver was still getting fuel - that false delivery status cost us a missed handoff and a detention fee. The ETA engine is the feature that grabbed my attention: when it’s right, it saves us frantic phone-tag with carriers; when it’s wrong it creates more work than it avoids. We run about 50 trucks and after 18 years in this business I’ve seen tech that promises accuracy and then buries you in exceptions - this feels like that: powerful in theory, inconsistent in practice. I’m torn because the consolidated timeline and pop-up alerts are handy, but I can’t schedule loads off Navisphere ETAs alone; we still have to call and confirm. If C.H. Robinson tightened up the ETA sources or added a clear confidence indicator, this could actually shave hours off our dispatch day instead of adding them.
We run fifty trucks across the Northeast and I've been in fleet management nearly 18 years, so I don’t get rattled easily. What really stood out was their support during a billing meltdown last quarter - invoices weren’t matching pickups and one support rep stayed on the phone with my billing clerk until they replicated the error and pushed a fix within 48 hours. One person owning the problem made all the difference; no pass-offs, clear explanations, and they even walked us through a small tweak to our booking-to-invoice flow. My only gripe is the follow-up docs were thin, so we had to write our own runbook for the office. Still, their hands-on help saved us time and stopped a lot of potential headaches.
One minute you get an engineer who actually knows international clearance rules, the next your ticket sits unanswered for days. My fleet of 50 trucks in the Northeast feels the pain when those gaps appear, because delays immediately ripple to customers. Phone queues are long and notes in the ticketing system get siloed between shifts - so you end up explaining the same problem three times. On the flip side, when you finally land the right specialist they’ll sometimes stay late and fix a nasty EDI mapping that had been tripping us up for weeks. Honestly torn between impressed and annoyed, so three stars until support becomes more consistently reliable.
Bottom line: Infor tightened our forecasting but made daily dispatching more fiddly than the old setup. The AI-driven demand signals actually caught seasonal swings we missed for years, which cut a few emergency loads and reduced stockouts - that part felt like a win. With a 50-truck fleet in the Northeast and 18 years of running freight, I can say the planning screens are cluttered and slower than the legacy TMS my dispatchers loved; simple reroutes that used to take seconds now cost ten minutes and a few help tickets. Integration wasn't plug-and-play either; we paid for custom connectors and still had quirks that support moved slowly on. I'm genuinely torn: the improved visibility paid off on tight weeks, but the day-to-day friction and expense mean it's not an automatic swap for those who prized speed and simplicity.
…but it sputtered when we needed it most during a surprise Nor'easter. The routing engine is clever and usually finds decent lanes, yet when our GPS feed went intermittent the platform stalled and several loads weren't reassigned automatically. I manage 50 trucks out of the Northeast and after 18 years you get pretty picky about reliability. Support did respond and we got manual workarounds, but the real fixes took days and a few drivers idled through tight appointment windows - time-sensitive runs felt the loss. Not perfect, not junk either; I keep it because it helps most days, and gnash my teeth the ones it doesn't.
Bottom line: pricey up front, but it paid for itself in under a year for us. I’ve run a 50-truck fleet in the Northeast for 18 years and the one thing that made me happiest was the load-matching optimizer - pulling partials together cut our deadhead roughly 18% and fuel costs dropped fast. Expect sticker shock on implementation and consulting fees; the monthly license isn’t cheap either, and it took a few weeks of tuning before routes stabilized. Still, when I ran the numbers against reduced overtime and fewer empty miles the ROI was obvious. If your operation can absorb the initial cost spike, this will put real dollars back on the bottom line.
...what really saved us was the freight settlement automation. It matched carrier invoices to bills of lading and applied our contracted rates automatically, catching fuel surcharge mismatches that used to eat up whole afternoons. I've been at this 18 years with a 50-truck fleet in the Northeast, and seeing the system auto-post payments after a quick approval step honestly felt like a small miracle. The dispute workflow is clunky - too many clicks and we still export to Excel for the odd edge case. All told it slashed our reconciliation time and invoice headaches enough to justify the spend; 4/5 because the exceptions UI needs polish.
I've used Detrack for three years. The mobile app's proof-of-delivery photos with automatic timestamp and geotag are the single feature that saved us hours fighting chargebacks and “never received” claims. Drivers pick it up fast; snap a picture, add a one-line note, hit send - no fumbling with menus during a rainy drop-off. Occasionally GPS drifts in the high-rise parts of the Northeast and skews the live ETA, but the map refresh usually corrects it within a couple minutes. For a 50-truck operation after nearly two decades in the business, it delivers the one thing we needed most: quick, trustworthy PODs, so I give it four stars.