Cartwright Freight books around 2,400 truckloads a week. The brokerage started in a converted warehouse on the west side of Columbus in 2009 and now has 380 people across six offices, from Louisville to Fort Wayne. Dispatch runs nearly around the clock, and the rules that keep it running change constantly: which carriers can take refrigerated loads into Chicago, how long a driver can wait at a dock before detention starts, who can approve a rate above the lane average.
Rules without reasons
Cartwright had the rules written down. What it did not have was the why. “A carrier would get suspended, and six months later a new dispatcher would book them again, because the page said ‘do not use’ and nothing else,” says Andre Whitfield, who leads operations. “The reason was on a call recording from March that nobody was ever going to watch.”
Team leads were spending close to five hours a week in recurring calls whose real job was to re-decide things that had already been decided.
Every rule gets a decision
The operations team moved the dispatch playbook into Quill over six weeks in early 2026. The rule was simple: no change to a playbook page without a discussion behind it. Someone proposes the change, the leads on each shift weigh in, and the person who opened the thread closes it with a written decision.
- The decision pins itself to the page, so the reason sits next to the rule.
- The decision log groups everything by lane, carrier and office.
- Reopening a decision keeps the old one on the record, struck through, with a link to the new one.
The Tuesday rules call was cancelled in the third week. Nobody asked for it back.
The $48,200 rule
One example gets told a lot inside Cartwright. A shipper in Dayton kept drivers waiting at its docks well past the free window, and detention fees piled up. The fix (book that shipper only with a confirmed appointment and a ninety-minute buffer) had been agreed on three separate calls and applied by nobody. Written as a decision on the shipper’s page, it held. Over the next two quarters the team avoided $48,200 in detention fees on that one account.
The point is not that the page is right. The point is that it says who decided, when, and why, so you know whether to argue with it.
A year on
Cartwright’s team leads report getting back 4.6 hours a week, mostly from meetings that no longer happen. Of the 412 dispatch pages, 97% were verified by their owners within the last ninety days. Andre’s favorite number is harder to measure: the night dispatcher who, at 4:00 AM, found the reason a carrier was suspended without calling anyone.
