TMS, WMS and ERP Integrations for European Road Freight

One integration, not a project per carrier

The reason visibility programmes stall is not the shipper’s system. It is the carrier base. A haulier with two hundred trucks can hold an EDI mapping open and absorb a format change. A haulier with twelve cannot, and in most European networks the twelve-truck operator is the majority of your partners by count even when the large carriers are the majority by volume.

What the small carrier does have is a telematics box, because the fleet management contract and the tachograph already put one in the cab. We connect to the telematics provider once and inherit every carrier who subscribes to it. That is why coverage arrives in weeks rather than one bilateral project at a time, and it is the whole argument for telematics integration ahead of anything else on this page.

What crosses the boundary

Every integration lands in the same event model

Whichever channel a fact arrives on, it is normalised into one internal event before anything downstream sees it. An arrival is an arrival whether it came from a geofence crossing, an EDIFACT IFTSTA segment or a webhook, and every event carries its source and whether the timestamp was machine-generated or keyed by a person.

That distinction is not academic. Detention, dwell and on-time performance are only defensible when the timestamps behind them were not supplied by the party who would pay the penalty, which is the argument set out in the guide to telematics data quality. Developers who want the field list directly should start at the road freight visibility API.

The seven weeks

GO LIVE is guaranteed in seven weeks, and the schedule is the same on every integration because the platform side never changes. What varies is how quickly your side can supply a test system and a named contact.

1. Weeks 1–2, scoping. We agree the field list, the direction of each field and which system is authoritative for it. This is the meeting that decides whether the project is easy, and skipping it is why integrations drift.
2. Weeks 3–4, connection. Credentials, endpoints and a first message moving in a test environment. Nothing is mapped yet, we are proving the pipe.
3. Week 5, mapping and events. Your fields onto our event model, including the definition of arrival, which is the single most disputed one.
4. Week 6, parallel run. Both systems live, event counts compared daily. Any gap is a mapping bug found before anybody depends on it.
5. Week 7, cutover and handover. Downstream consumers switch, monitoring is handed to your team with the reconciliation report that tells you when a feed goes quiet.

Data residency, GDPR and ISO 27001

Freight data is operational data about identifiable drivers and vehicles, so it falls under GDPR whichever way it reaches us. Three things are usually asked in a European security review, and the answers do not change per integration.

• Where the data sits. Processing and storage stay within the EU.
• Who can see it. Your freight data stays inside your trusted carrier network. A carrier sees the loads they are assigned, not your wider network.
• How it is governed. TrucksOnTheMap is ISO 27001 certified, and the controls that matter to a transport integration are access control, retention and the audit trail on every event.

Position data has a retention question of its own. Decide up front how long raw pings are kept as against derived events, because the derived events are what your KPIs need and the raw trace is what a works council will ask about.

Common questions

Do we need our IT department to integrate TrucksOnTheMap?

Not in the sense of a development project. The platform side is built and documented, so what your side supplies is credentials, a test system and a named contact who can confirm the field list. Most of the seven weeks is agreeing what each field means and running both systems in parallel, not writing code. Where no interface exists at all, a scheduled file drop over SFTP is a supported fallback.

How do you get visibility from small carriers who have no IT?

By connecting to their telematics provider rather than to them. A twelve-truck haulier already runs a telematics box for fleet management and tachograph downloads, and that provider has an API. One integration with the provider yields position data from every carrier subscribing to it, so the long tail of your carrier base is covered without a project per relationship.

Can you receive data by EDI rather than API?

Yes. EDIFACT messages such as IFTMIN, IFTSTA and DESADV are supported over AS2, SFTP or OFTP2, and X12 equivalents where a North American partner is involved. Both channels are mapped onto the same internal event model, so no downstream report needs to know which channel a given event arrived on.

How long does an integration take?

Seven weeks to GO LIVE, in five phases: scoping the field list in weeks one and two, proving the connection in weeks three and four, mapping fields and events in week five, a parallel run with daily event-count comparison in week six, and cutover with handover of the reconciliation report in week seven.

Where is our freight data stored?

Processing and storage stay within the EU, and TrucksOnTheMap is ISO 27001 certified. Your freight data stays inside your trusted carrier network: a carrier sees the loads they are assigned rather than your wider network. Retention of raw position pings as against derived events is agreed during scoping, because the two have different retention logic.

See it running on your own lanes

Bring one lane and one system. We will show the freight order going out and the position, ETA and ePOD coming back.