Mid-market 3PL adds Keelway as an overlay on McLeod LoadMaster.

The starting point

An 85-broker Midwest 3PL running ~7,200 loads / month across dry van, reefer, and flatbed. McLeod LoadMaster as system of record, deployed for nine years, deeply customized with internal scripting and a custom EDI pipeline to top shippers. Carrier vetting handled via a mix of FMCSA spot checks, Carrier411, and a manual three-tier broker-approval list. Inbound carrier email handled per broker in their own Outlook inbox.

The pain: load volume had grown 22% the previous year and coordinator productivity was flat. The COO had a budget request in front of the CEO for 8 additional coordinator hires — roughly $640K loaded — to keep up with the next year's growth projection. The CEO had rejected the request twice.

McLeod was non-negotiable. The 9-year investment, the EDI pipeline, and the deep customization made any replacement a 12-to-18-month program nobody had appetite for. The question wasn't "what TMS"; it was "what AI fits on top of the TMS we have".

Why Keelway fit the overlay shape

Most freight-broker AI tools assume they get to be the system. Voice-AI tools push brokers into a dialer UI. New TMSs push brokers into a new dashboard. Keelway is calibrated to the opposite: brokers stay in the inbox they already live in (Gmail or Outlook, in this case Outlook through a server-side connector), McLeod stays system of record, and the AI surfaces ranked decisions inside the surface the broker is already using.

The integration to McLeod LoadMaster ran in both directions — Keelway pulled active load context (origin, destination, equipment, target rate, posting time) from McLeod, and pushed accepted carriers + final rates back into McLeod via the LoadMaster API as standard booking events. See the McLeod integration page for the technical detail.

The rollout — 8 weeks, no floor disruption

1. Week 1. Discovery, scope sign-off, security packet exchanged. SCIM provisioning from the customer's Okta tenant. Sandbox Keelway tenant provisioned in AWS us-east-1.
2. Week 2. McLeod LoadMaster API integration configured. Historical carrier-data migration on the previous 18 months — about 9,400 unique carriers with FMCSA backfill. Label taxonomy and ranking weights reviewed per desk (reefer weights insurance heavier; flatbed weights equipment verification heavier).
3. Weeks 3–4. First 10 brokers (the reefer desk) went live in shadow mode — Keelway reading and ranking, but the existing manual triage workflow continuing in parallel. Reefer desk lead reviewed the ranked top-5 vs. their own picks every morning.
4. Week 5. Reefer desk cut over to Keelway-driven triage. Daily syncs for the first two weeks; 30-minute weekly check-ins after that.
5. Weeks 6–8. Phased rollout across flatbed, dry van, and dedicated-lanes desks. Each desk took 4–5 business days from shadow mode to cutover.

Total elapsed time from contract signature to full-floor adoption: 53 days. No coordinators left, no broker workflow rebuilt, no McLeod customization touched.

What changed at month 6

• Load volume grew 38% over the next two quarters — from 7,200 to about 9,900 monthly loads — driven by reps having time to chase additional shipper relationships instead of triaging inbound carrier replies.
• Coordinator headcount stayed flat at 85. The budget request the CEO had rejected went off the table.
• Fraud incidents dropped sharply. Three double-brokering attempts and one chameleon-MC booking were caught in the first 90 days post-rollout. In the previous 12 months under the manual process, the brokerage had eaten roughly $42K in cargo claims tied to two confirmed double-brokering incidents and one stolen-MC fraud.
• Time-to-cover on standard dry-van loads dropped from a median of 73 minutes to 19 minutes — measured from posting time to first accepted booking.

The contracting shape

Enterprise contract, custom pricing modeled on load volume and seat count, dedicated tenant in us-east-1, SAML SSO via Okta, SCIM provisioning, audit logs streamed to the customer's Splunk deployment. Signed MSA, signed DPA, 99.9% uptime SLA. Named CSM, named SE, 24/7 Microsoft Teams shared channel for incident response.

See Keelway Enterprise for the full posture, or the security page for the compliance specifics.