Nestor Stiedemann
Activity
Reviews
91 reviews · average 2.7
Ten trucks on the West Coast pushed me to try bulkTMS when seasonal harvest began. The commodity CSV import simplified onboarding - the fields matched our grain manifests so I imported a month’s orders in a morning, which saved more time than I expected. Mapping a couple of custom fields was a bit fiddly and required a short call with support, but that call was focused and resolved the problem.
When I uploaded USDOT and insurance documents and completed a lengthy profile, my account sat in “pending verification” with no email or progress update for three days - during that time two hopper loads went unbooked and our drivers were idle. Every attempt to post a bulk load during that window timed out and wiped the form, and support replies took nearly 48 hours; I lost pay and trust. For a fleet of ten trucks trying to hit narrow harvest windows, that onboarding friction cost me roughly $700 in missed revenue and convinced me to abandon the platform.
Managing ten trucks along the West Coast, I needed a dispatch system that wouldn't fail during peak booking windows. PCS Dispatch Manager reliably pushed last-minute assignments to drivers and kept ETAs intact when traffic forced route changes, which prevented several missed pickups for us. What made me happiest was how a single drag-and-drop reassignment updated every affected schedule immediately; only occasional mobile sync delays prevented perfection.
When a sudden port closure in Los Angeles forced us to reroute three westbound loads last month, PCS's Cortex AI flagged a consolidated diversion that reduced deadhead and cut fuel spend by nearly 12%. With a ten-truck operation and only a year on the system, the subscription felt expensive at first, but that instant recommendation and the faster invoicing converted the fee into measurable savings within weeks. It was worth every dollar.
I've used PeopleNet for one year. For my 10-truck fleet on the West Coast the billed fees - about $35 per truck monthly, roughly $350 per device up front, plus surprise support charges - quickly ate into margins, and the platform's narrow focus on compliance meant we weren't seeing returns beyond the basics. Support response was slow when hardware failed, causing downtime and extra costs that made the whole investment feel unjustified.
My main complaint is the price: the platform's upfront and monthly fees felt grossly disproportionate to the value we received. We paid roughly $5,500 in setup and about $700/month, so after one year our direct spend approached $14,000, and we still had recurring settlement delays that forced us to factor invoices and pay roughly $1,200 in financing costs. For a ten-truck fleet on the West Coast this was not worth it - billing was confusing and the promised efficiency gains never materialized.
I've used Dossier Systems for one year. The platform improved equipment visibility and helped catch a couple of maintenance issues that saved us money, but the monthly fees felt steep for a ten-truck private fleet on the West Coast - and the setup and quirks in dispatch added unexpected administrative time. Ultimately I'm torn: it does deliver measurable value in asset management, yet the cost and overhead make the return marginal for our size.
Two Fridays ago the TMS failed during the morning dispatch window and blocked load confirmations for nearly three hours. That outage left drivers waiting, forced last-minute rebookings, and cost our ten-truck operation on the West Coast more than $1,200 in detention and reroute fees while office staff frantically processed paper manifests. Support was slow to respond and the temporary workaround required manual entries that completely undermined the system’s purpose; reliability like this is unacceptable for a fleet trying to meet tight pickup windows.
...but switching to Infor proved costly. Our previous on‑prem TMS and spreadsheets - clunky but predictable - handled demand spikes better than Infor’s forecasting; the cloud models mispredicted volumes, which cascaded into late pickups and hours of manual rescheduling while drivers sat idle. Over six months that translated into overtime, extra fuel, and a contract penalty that hurt this ten‑truck operation, so we’re reverting to the old system.
Bottom line: getting started with Infios was a costly and time-consuming failure for our small operation. Managing ten trucks on the West Coast with about a year of experience on comparable systems, I found onboarding riddled with field‑mapping errors and a weeks‑long integration process that left drivers with wrong manifests and forced overtime; support responses were slow and often required repeated escalation. The net result was missed deliveries, extra labor costs, and a loss of confidence in the platform’s ability to get us up and running.
Bottom line: Not worth the expense. We operate ten trucks on the West Coast and spent roughly $30,000 in first-year licensing, onboarding, and unexpected transaction fees, yet persistent invoicing errors and slow support meant settlements were routinely delayed and cash flow took a hit. The platform never delivered the promised time savings, so between extra staff hours and penalties for late payments the investment ended up costing us more than it saved.