Road freight is the moving of goods by truck, together with the software that plans the trucks and finds a truck with space for a load. In India, most goods travel by road for at least part of their journey, for example from a factory to a warehouse, or from a warehouse to a shop.
Three kinds of company take part, as the page on freight brokers and forwarders explains. The shipper is the company whose goods are moved, such as a tile factory. The carrier owns the trucks and moves the goods. A broker finds a truck for a load and earns a margin on the deal. In India, the companies that arrange trucks for shippers are usually called transporters. Many of them own some trucks and hire the rest from small owners.
Large shippers plan their trips in a transportation management system (TMS). It groups orders into truckloads, books the trucks and follows each trip. The rates that the TMS uses usually come from freight procurement, in which the shipper invites transporters to bid for its regular routes. After each trip, freight bill audit checks the transporter's bill against the agreed rate. At a large distribution centre, a yard management system (YMS) decides which waiting truck goes to which dock door.
For a load at short notice, the shipper needs a truck that has space today. A digital freight marketplace matches the load with such a truck, and suggests a price from data. Its simplest form is the load board, an online list of loads waiting for trucks. In India, most trucks belong to owners with one or two trucks each. So in India, the bigger change is the trucking app for owners, on which a small owner finds loads, pays tolls and runs the truck from a phone. For goods moved within one city, such as a sofa or a shop's stock, an intra-city logistics app sends a mini-truck.
Consider what one truck needs before it leaves a textile mill in Surat for Delhi. The load needs an e-way bill, an electronic permit generated on the GST portal for most goods worth more than ₹50,000. The truck's FASTag pays each toll on the way, through electronic tolling. A telematics device in the truck reports its location to the office. The driver buys diesel with a fuel card.
In the United States, trucking is a very large industry, with many brokers and large fleets of long-haul trucks. There, a tablet in each truck's cab runs the driver's apps on a truck tablet platform. Much of the American software for transport management and freight marketplaces is built by engineers in Chennai, Bengaluru and Hyderabad.