Back in February, I wrote a post titled, “Should You Really Vibe Code a TMS?”
Apparently, the answer was “Yes” for Oberman Logistics, an owner-operator trucking company with 14 trucks based in Tennessee. As reported by Angel Coker Jones in Commercial Carrier Journal, “Oberman Logistics owner Wes Oberman created a custom transportation management system using ChatGPT and Claude Code for just $55 per month, automating back-office processes and saving the company 20 to 25 hours each week.”
Oberman evaluated existing TMS solutions in the market, but “none of [them] worked,” he said. “My problem with TMS is they’re all so bloated (having more features than needed). They all look like they were made from the ‘70s. They’re not very intuitive, and man, they cost a lot.”
You can read the article for more details.
As I wrote back in February, two things can be true at once. First, despite the early benefits achieved by Oberman Logistics, I still believe that if you’re a manufacturer, retailer, distributor, or even a 3PL, vibe coding an enterprise solution like a TMS is probably not the smartest use of your time and resources.
And second, if you’re a TMS or any other enterprise software vendor, if you’re not empowering customers to drive more of their own innovation, and rethinking your pricing and business model accordingly, you’re going to run into rough waters. The value is shifting from who builds the most features to who enables the fastest, safest, and most scalable innovation.
Speaking of driving your own innovation, Google announced last month the general availability of Large Vehicle Routing (LVR) in the United States across its Routes API, Route Optimization API, and Navigation SDK. Check out the press release for all the details.
In short, LVR enables logistics companies to plan and optimize routes based on the specific characteristics of their vehicles, including height, weight, length, axle count, and hazardous-goods classifications. The solution can optimize routes across multiple stops and vehicles while accounting for road restrictions, traffic, tolls, and vehicle accessibility. It also provides truck-specific ETAs based on observed large-vehicle speeds and real-time and predictive traffic data, and connects planned routes with turn-by-turn navigation so drivers can follow the same restriction-aware routes created by planners.
Almost 12 years ago, we published a guest commentary by Anthony Vitiello titled, “The Google TMS?” Here is an excerpt of what he wrote at the time:
Is Google TMS a serious possibility? This we know: Google is a company on the move, making inroads into businesses far outside Internet search, and it’s well equipped to succeed…Consider that Google already delivers numerous applications and services that it could easily repurpose as the primary building blocks of a TMS. Here’s how its existing technologies and tools correlate to the features and functionality currently available in top-tier, cloud-based TMS solutions.
Is Large Vehicle Routing a competitive threat to best-of-breed route planning and optimization solutions?
Yes, but not directly.
Google isn’t offering a complete route planning and execution application that competes feature-for-feature with established vendors. Instead, it is providing sophisticated routing capabilities that companies with strong IT resources can use to build their own applications, or that software vendors can embed into their solutions.
And that’s the common thread connecting Oberman Logistics vibe coding its own TMS and Google making routing capabilities available via APIs: the barriers to building your own logistics applications are coming down.
That doesn’t mean companies should start building their own TMS or routing solutions. But as AI makes software development easier and sophisticated capabilities become available via APIs, established vendors will increasingly have to differentiate beyond features and algorithms. They’ll need to enable customers to innovate faster while providing the reliability, security, governance, and scalability enterprises require.
So, is “The Google TMS” finally here? Not exactly. But Google doesn’t have to build a TMS to change the market. It only has to make it easier for others to build one.
