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Real-time load tracking alerts · Built for brokers

Know before the shipper calls.

Keelway's delivery-location alerting is real-time freight visibility that actually pings you when something matters. Geofence arrival, ETA drift past the appointment window, detention threshold crossed, route deviation, HOS-out risk — pushed to your phone, Slack, or TMS ticket the moment it happens. Built for freight broker coordinators and 3PL operations managers who are tired of finding out from the shipper.

See alerts in actionPair with AI check-calls
<5 min
from geofence event to coordinator alert
Keelway platform data
3×
more detention billed vs. manual tracking
Keelway customer cohort, 2026
67%
fewer "where is my truck" shipper calls
Post-deployment survey

The alert problem freight brokers actually have

Most freight brokerages already pay for tracking visibility — a Macropoint subscription, a Project44 contract, a FourKites feed, or direct Motive / Samsara ELD access. What they don't have is alerting that actually fires at the right moment, to the right person, on the right channel. The coordinator sees the truck on a map — after the shipper calls. The detention timer runs past — after accessorials were untouchable. The truck deviates 200 miles off route — and the first person to notice is a consignee calling to ask where the load is.

Keelway bolts an alerting layer on top of whatever visibility sources you already have. We fuse ELD feeds, visibility-API feeds, and AI voice-call-captured positions into a single ground-truth position for every active load, evaluate every tracking event against your alert policies, and push the alert to the coordinator who owns the load before the shipper has a reason to call you.

Alert events Keelway fires on

Geofence

Shipper &amp; consignee arrival / departure

Configurable radius (default 500m) around every pickup and delivery address. Keelway fires entry, exit, and dwell events — pushed to your coordinator, your shipper's tracking portal, and the load ticket in your TMS. Multi-stop loads get per-stop geofence handling, not just origin and final destination.
ETA drift

Appointment-window breach detection

We compute the truck's projected ETA every 5 minutes against the appointment window on the load. When the projection drifts outside the window by your policy threshold (default 30 minutes), the alert fires. The coordinator sees it before the shipper's scheduling team does — and has a chance to call the consignee to extend the window.
Detention

Detention timer, billable accessorials

Truck crosses into a shipper / consignee geofence, Keelway starts a detention timer. At the policy threshold (usually 2 hours free), the AI voice agent dials the driver to capture the detention reason, opens the accessorial ticket on the load, and flags your AP to bill it. Brokers on Keelway bill roughly 3× more detention accessorial than they did manually.
Route

Off-route &amp; dwell detection

We compare the truck's live position to the expected great-circle corridor (with lane-specific tolerance for known detours). More than N miles off-route or stopped more than M minutes off any known truckstop? Alert fires. Early signal on theft, accident, hijacking, or driver issue — hours before voice check-in catches it.
HOS

Hours-of-service breach risk

We pull the driver's remaining duty hours from the ELD and project against remaining miles at legal speed. Driver won't make the delivery without running out of hours? Alert fires — usually 6–12 hours ahead of the legal shutdown. You call the consignee and reschedule instead of explaining after the fact.
Exception

Breakdowns, refusals, damage

When the driver or dispatcher reports an exception — to the Keelway voice agent, via text, or via an ELD fault code — we extract structured data (reason, ETA impact, severity), fire a critical alert to the coordinator, and file the exception record on the load automatically.

Where alerts go — channel routing the way a broker actually works

Brokerage coordinators aren't going to open yet another dashboard. Keelway alerts are pushed to the channels your team already lives in:

  • SMS — to the coordinator who owns the load. Critical alerts (appointment-window breach, detention threshold, off-route) default to SMS.
  • Slack or Microsoft Teams — per customer-book channel, or per shipper account. Great for ops managers who need aggregate visibility without manning the phone.
  • TMS ticket — a tracking event on the load in Tai, McLeod, Aljex, Revenova, Turvo, or Rose Rocket. The event is stamped with the source (ELD, visibility API, AI voice call) and the raw payload.
  • Email digest — once or twice a day. Used for informational events (geofence entry, appointment confirmations) that don't need real-time action.
  • Customer-facing portal — Keelway can host a white-labeled tracking page for your shippers, or push events via webhook into the shipper's OTM, SAP TM, Blue Yonder, or Oracle TMS.

Tracking source fusion — why single-source tracking misses things

Every tracking source has gaps. ELD is perfect when the carrier has it — and invisible when they don't. Visibility APIs like Macropoint, Project44, and FourKites cover a wide carrier network but lag 5–15 minutes behind real position and sometimes lose the truck mid-load. Phone-based tracking gets you position when the others miss — but only as fresh as the last call. Keelway fuses all three:

  • Direct ELD integration: Motive (KeepTruckin), Samsara, Geotab, ELD Rider, Omnitracs, EROAD, Verizon Connect, FleetComplete, Azuga, Zonar, Surfsight.
  • Visibility APIs: Descartes MacroPoint, Project44, FourKites, Trucker Tools, truckerCloud, Shipwell.
  • AI voice capture: the Keelway AI phone-call agent calls the carrier for position whenever digital sources are silent or stale.

We reconcile the three into one ground-truth position and one confidence score per load. When sources disagree, we tell you why and which one we trusted.

Why this matters for on-time delivery and OTP scorecards

Shippers grade their brokers on two metrics: on-time pickup (OTP) and on-time delivery (OTD). The broker's scorecard at Walmart, Target, Home Depot, Amazon Freight, and the rest of the big shipper networks is built almost entirely on these two. Every ETA-drift alert Keelway fires is an opportunity to save a late — by calling the consignee for a window extension, by finding a team-driver swap, or by diverting to a closer drop-yard. Customers running Keelway report OTD scorecards moving up 4–9 percentage points in the first quarter.

Built for the modern broker ops stack

Keelway delivery alerts slot into the workflow every modern 3PL already runs:

  • Feeds forward into Tai TMS, McLeod LoadMaster, Aljex, Revenova, Turvo, Rose Rocket, and via API into any homegrown broker system.
  • Feeds out to Blue Yonder TMS, Oracle TMS, Manhattan, MercuryGate, SAP TM, e2open, and shipper-custom portals via webhook or EDI 214.
  • Co-runs with Macropoint, Project44, FourKites, Trucker Tools — we subscribe to their events and enrich them with the alerting layer they don't ship.
  • Observability: Datadog and Grafana-compatible metric export, plus a native SLA dashboard for your operations manager.

Frequently asked questions

What is delivery-location alerting?+
Delivery-location alerting is real-time notification that something is happening with a load that the broker needs to know about — the truck arrived at the shipper geofence, the ETA drifted past the appointment window, the truck has been sitting at a consignee longer than the detention threshold, or the driver deviated off the expected route. Keelway pushes those alerts to the broker's phone, Slack, Teams, or TMS ticket before the shipper has a reason to call.
How does Keelway know where the truck is?+
Three sources, fused: (1) direct ELD / telematics feeds from the carrier — Motive, Samsara, Geotab, EROAD, Omnitracs, Verizon Connect, ELD Rider; (2) carrier tracking APIs — Macropoint, Project44, FourKites, Trucker Tools, truckerCloud; (3) the Keelway AI phone-call agent, which calls the carrier for position when no digital feed is available. Most loads have two of the three — we reconcile them into a single ground-truth position every 5 minutes.
What specific events trigger an alert?+
Pickup-geofence entry and exit, consignee-geofence entry and exit, ETA drift past a policy threshold (e.g., 30 minutes over the appointment window), detention thresholds crossed (typically 2 hours free + billable start), route deviation (truck more than N miles off the expected corridor), dwell alerts (truck stopped more than M minutes off-route), HOS-out risk (driver will run out of hours before delivery), and exception events reported by the driver. You pick which events alert for which customer lanes.
Where does the alert go?+
Your choice per broker: SMS to the coordinator on the load, a Slack or Microsoft Teams channel for the shipper book, a webhook into your TMS that creates a ticket on the load, or an email digest for less time-sensitive events. Critical alerts (detention threshold, appointment window breach) default to SMS plus Slack/Teams. Informational alerts (geofence entry) default to TMS-ticket only.
How is this different from Macropoint, Project44, or FourKites?+
Those platforms are visibility networks — they aggregate tracking data across carriers and sell the feed. Keelway consumes those feeds (and direct ELD feeds, and AI voice-call data) and turns them into broker-actionable alerts. Macropoint gives you a map; Keelway pings your phone when something on the map actually matters. Most mid-market brokers run both: Macropoint / Project44 / FourKites on one side for shipper-facing visibility, Keelway on the other side for broker-facing alerting.
Can the alert trigger a carrier call automatically?+
Yes. When a detention threshold or ETA-drift threshold fires, the Keelway AI phone-call agent auto-dials the carrier to investigate — captures the reason, updates the load ticket, and escalates only if human judgment is needed. See our AI Phone Call Agent page. The alert becomes the action, not just the notification.
Does the shipper see these alerts too?+
Optionally. You can configure a customer-facing tracking portal or a webhook to your shipper's OTM / SAP / Blue Yonder system with any subset of events. Most brokers send geofence events, appointment confirmations, and exception events to the shipper and keep detention-billing events internal.
Pricing?+
Included in the $799/mo Keelway price — no per-event or per-alert charges on top. Generate as many geofence, ETA-drift, dwell, and detention alerts on a load as the load earns. International tracking, SMS to non-US phone numbers, and premium visibility partners (some Project44 / FourKites tiers) are metered separately and published on the contact page.
Real-time alerts · Multi-source tracking · TMS-native

The shipper calls after you already fixed it.

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