Descartes has launched MacroPoint ELD+, running ELD and mobile-app tracking on the same shipment simultaneously rather than forcing brokers to pick one data source. The product, outlined by Andrew Wimer, Associate General Manager, Transportation Management at Descartes, on FreightWaves' What the Truck?!?, turns a single tracking session into two independent data streams.

Wimer, who oversees the MacroPoint visibility platform, said the fundamentals of visibility haven't moved. "It's always been 'Where's my truck?' or 'Where's the load? Where's the freight?'" he told host Malcolm Harris. "That's still essential. Don't get me wrong. You need to know where your freight is or where your truck is."

The difference is that the industry leaned on ELDs as "the silver bullet" for tracking, and in doing so sidelined the drivers themselves. "There's a massive network of millions of drivers who are very good drivers, who are reliable drivers, and who are safe drivers, and when they're removed from visibility, they don't have the ability to help validate shipment status," Wimer said.

What does dual tracking change for brokers?

The redundancy is the point. If a driver's phone loses signal, or an ELD provider's API goes down, the other source keeps the shipment visible instead of leaving a blind spot in the timeline.

"If there's a gap in connectivity or signal or for whatever reason there's an issue with one of the devices, the other one's still picking up data and fulfilling any gaps in visibility so you can provide your shippers with good customer service and meet your compliance metrics and scorecards," Wimer said.

Under the hood, MacroPoint no longer picks a single best identifier per shipment. It tracks all of them at once, in one session, and feeds everything back to the transportation management system. "We're tracking them all on a single session," Wimer said. "We're sending it all back to the TMS."

The second payoff is fraud detection. When a truck's ELD and a driver's phone stop telling the same story, that divergence itself is a signal. "Truck and driver should be telling the same story, moving down the highway together," Wimer said. "If they go separate ways or signals go different directions, that should set off an alert and an operational workflow to call and investigate."

A mismatch doesn't always mean fraud. It's still worth a phone call.

Spoofing and the team-driver bait-and-switch

Wimer pointed to a pattern the industry has reckoned with over the past year: bad actors spoofing location data on both ELDs and driver-facing apps. "There's spoofing of both ELDs and of the mobile app across any platform," he said. "Having multiple signals to help validate fraud and give you more data to then go out and talk to carriers is very important."

One scam brokers run into often: a carrier sells team-driver service — two drivers alternating to keep a truck moving around the clock — while actually running solo. The bait-and-switch can surface as a single phone number covering a load that should have two. Wimer, a former broker himself, said he's seen it firsthand, and that tracking multiple data sources catches such issues as they occur.

No new lift for TMS users

Rollout required no new work from Descartes' TMS partners or the brokers on them. Using Descartes Tai TMS as an example, Wimer explained that a broker's existing driver information — phone number, truck number, trailer number — flows automatically into MacroPoint to start tracking. "ELD plus just starts off the bat," he said. "There's nothing extra a customer needs to do."

"We don't want to add complexity to what a TMS has to send to MacroPoint," Wimer added. "We want to handle that within the application ourselves."

The scale behind that promise rests on roughly two decades of building the MacroPoint driver network — "millions of unique drivers on the network, with their cell phones," per Wimer — plus nine years of telematics integration work, now covering more than 500 ELD and telematics providers globally.

The weak link, though, isn't the platform. Asked what shippers, carriers, and brokers should fix first, Wimer pointed to dispatch-floor data entry. "The first thing would be ensuring that you are working with your brokers on the floor to get full driver information. That's the biggest gap we see," he said. "It starts with a good phone number. It starts with a good truck number or trailer number in the TMS so that then we have something accurate to track against."

Wimer knows the temptation to cut corners firsthand from his brokerage days under deadline pressure. Multiplied across an industry, that habit still undermines visibility tools, however many sources feed them. Expect dual-source tracking to become the baseline expectation as spoofing keeps pressure on both brokers and their scorecards.