SHM Transport: a TMS built around the company, not the other way round

The problem: renting software that didn’t fit

SHM Transport Inc. is a US trucking company with more than 60 employees. Like most carriers their size, they ran on an off-the-shelf TMS — $2,100 every month, hard-capped at 10 logins.

Ten logins for a 60-person company means shared passwords, dispatchers queuing for screens, and half the team working around the system in spreadsheets instead of in it. And because the software was generic, every SHM-specific workflow became a manual workaround someone had to remember.

The build: their operation, as software

Instead of renting a compromise forever, we built their own TMS. The partnership started in 2024, and I worked directly with the owner and the dispatch team, shipping in increments they could react to — which meant the software was shaped by the people running freight, not by a spec document.

• Shipment lifecycle from booking to delivery, with the paperwork attached where the work happens
• Dispatch tooling built around how their team actually assigns and tracks loads
• Driver and fleet records in the same system as the freight they move
• Billing and documents generated from shipment data instead of retyped into other tools
• Roles and permissions for every employee — no login cap, no shared passwords

Stack: Laravel, Inertia.js, React, and Node.js services, deployed on DigitalOcean. Boring, proven technology that a 60-person company can depend on.

The result: software as an asset, not a bill

We rolled out the way serious migrations should happen: the system went live in November 2025, ran side by side with the old TMS through two months of real-world testing, and became the company’s system of record in January 2026. Since then it has processed over 3,000 shipments — that volume in months, not years.

The per-seat rent is gone: SHM owns the code, the servers, and the data, and every new hire gets an account on day one. When the business changes, the software changes with it — usually within days.

The strongest result is what happened next. After seeing the TMS in production, SHM’s CEO brought me two more projects — starting with an AI agent that cold-calls prospects and books demos for their sales pipeline. That system now lives inside the same platform.

Could this be your company?

If you’re paying monthly for software that your team fights instead of uses, the math has probably already tipped in favor of owning your own. Run your own numbers with the SaaS vs. owning payback calculator, or I’ll walk you through what it looks like for your operation — including when it’s not worth it.