Two people left. Four systems died. The load count moved 2%.

How BASE Carriers, a refrigerated-produce drayage operation out of the Port of Wilmington, took ~$240K/yr of cost out of the business without dropping a load.

• Company: BASE Carriers — refrigerated produce drayage & brokerage, Wilmington DE
• Lanes: Port of Wilmington, Gloucester City NJ, Philadelphia — bananas and fresh produce for some of the biggest names in the business
• Volume: ~550 loads/month, 90% repeat lanes
• Scale: 8-figure brokerage; ~10 employees on the transport side, now 8
• Replaced: Rose Rocket, RMIS, MacroPoint (in progress), the master spreadsheet

The operation

BASE Carriers runs one of the harder corners of trucking: port drayage on refrigerated produce. Containers come off ships carrying bananas that ripen on a schedule, port gates close at 4 PM whether you're ready or not, and every load has a customer who wants to know where their fruit is right now. Roughly 550 loads a month, coordinated across dozens of carriers and drivers.

Before: four systems and a human router

Until this spring, the operation ran on a stack any brokerage will recognize: Rose Rocket as the TMS, RMIS for carrier onboarding and compliance, MacroPoint for tracking, and a giant spreadsheet that was the real system of record — because none of the tools talked to each other.

The glue between them was people. One full-time team member, Iza, spent her entire week — 50 hours of it — moving the same load through three systems: keying it into the spreadsheet, building the rate confirmation in Rose Rocket, sending the tracking requests. Every load, three times, by hand.

"That was her whole job. Adding loads to the sheet, building rate cons, sending tracking. Full time."

— Amedeo DeLuca, BASE Carriers

And that 50 hours understates it. Angelica, the port manager, built the week's port loads by hand every single week on top of her actual job. That upload now takes under a minute.

The switch

BASE cut over to Drayford in late June and shut the old stack down behind it. RMIS went off the same day the platform's carrier portal took over onboarding — FMCSA lookups, compliance checks, and agreement signing, with no gap in carrier vetting. Rose Rocket took its last charge in June. The spreadsheet stopped being the system of record the same week.

The load intake is the part worth being precise about. Any TMS — Rose Rocket included — will generate a rate confirmation once a human has typed the whole load in. That was never the bottleneck; the typing was. The difference now: BASE takes a customer's spreadsheet of 40 loads, uploads it, and the AI builds 40 complete loads with rate cons ready to send — instantly. The generation didn't get automated. The entering did.

From there the platform carries the rest: repeat lanes that pre-fill themselves, carrier onboarding and compliance, tracking, invoicing on both the customer and carrier side, document collection, and nightly delivery reports that reach customers without anyone touching them.

The texting layer

Drayage runs on text messages — at BASE's volume, roughly 775 a day wash over the operation from drivers, carriers, and customers. Before the switch, that traffic ran one direction: things came in, dispatchers answered what they could, and proactive outbound — tracking prompts, overdue check-in chases, arrival notices to customers — simply didn't happen. Nobody had the hands to originate it. The texts also lived in a standalone app with one shared inbox, so the message and the load it belonged to never met.

Now the texting is a feature of the TMS itself, and the outbound exists for the first time. The same dispatch line tells the story by itself: in May, the last full month before the switch, it sent 414 texts — about 13 a day. In July, the first full month on the platform, it sent 3,349. In the last seven days alone: 926 — more than two entire Mays in one week. Every message threads to its load, visible to whoever opens that load next, and a growing share of the outbound is originated by the platform itself: tracking prompts to drivers, chases when an update is overdue, arrival notifications to customers. The same engine posts check calls directly into customers' own TMS portals, so their system of record updates without anyone at BASE — or at the customer — touching a phone.

Tracking runs through driver phones the same way: 2,600+ GPS pings logged straight to loads, which is what finally puts MacroPoint's $1,500 a month in reach of the axe.

What happened to the org chart

Here is the part that doesn't show up in a feature list.

BASE is an eight-figure brokerage that runs its entire transport side with about ten people. Over the same stretch, it lost two of them — senior ones: a $110K/year operations manager and the lead dispatcher, call it a $70K/year seat. In the old world, both get replaced within the month, because the operation physically doesn't run without them.

Neither was replaced. The transport side runs with eight today.

Instead, Iza — whose entire 50-hour-a-week job had just been automated away — moved into the lead dispatcher seat. A three-system data-entry role became a promotion, and two salaries came off the books permanently.

"Between the two of them leaving, we didn't hire anyone. We haven't missed a beat — if anything, things have kept getting easier."

— Amedeo DeLuca, BASE Carriers

The numbers

• Software eliminated (QuickBooks-verified): ~$5,000/mo → ~$60K/yr
• Departures not backfilled: ~$180K/yr
• Admin work automated (Iza's full role + the weekly port-load upload): 50+ hrs/week
• Total annual cost avoided: ~$240K/yr
• Volume — last full month on the old stack (May): ~556 loads
• Volume — first full month on Drayford (July): 544 loads
• Dispatch-line texts — May vs. last 7 days: 414/month → 926/week

The volume line is the one worth staring at — and the seasonality makes it better than it looks. Produce falls off every summer, bananas especially, because the schools that eat them are out. July should be meaningfully softer than May in this business. Instead, a transition that removed two people and four systems landed in the seasonal trough at 12 loads off the May number. The operation didn't survive the cutover — it didn't notice it.

Where it goes from here

The last legacy tool still running is MacroPoint, at $1,500 a month. Tracking has been moving onto the platform's driver texting and check-call automation — which now posts status updates directly into customers' own TMS portals. When it goes, the software line drops by another $18K a year.

"It's made my life significantly easier. That's the honest version of the case study."

— Amedeo DeLuca, BASE Carriers

BASE Carriers moves refrigerated produce through the Port of Wilmington, Gloucester City, and Philadelphia. Drayford is a TMS for carriers and brokers built around one idea: a portal waits — Drayford seeks out the update.