What a TMS does
Five jobs, in the order a trip happens:
- Book the trip. The customer, the loading and delivery locations, the date and the price.
- Assign a truck and a driver who are free that day.
- Follow the trip. Left, arrived at loading, arrived at delivery, done.
- Prove the delivery. Photos, a signed receipt, the time of each step.
- Report. Who was late, how long trips took, which trucks are off the road.
The big platforms add route planning across many stops, freight rates, carrier tendering and billing.
A TMS is not a tracking device
A tracker tells you where a truck is. It doesn't tell you which trip it's on, whether it was loaded, or whether the customer has the goods. Fleet management is a third thing again: it looks after the vehicles themselves, their servicing and their documents.
When a trucking company needs one
- When trips are booked in a group chat and a spreadsheet, and no copy is complete.
- When you hear a trip is late from the customer, not from your own system.
- When only the dispatcher knows which truck is where, and the work stalls the day he's away.
- When drivers don't read Arabic or English, so instructions get lost.
- When an Istemarah or Fahes expires before anyone notices.
What to check before you choose
- Your kind of work. Booked trips with a truck and a driver, or parcel routes with dozens of stops? They need different software.
- Your drivers' languages. Urdu and Bengali, not only Arabic and English.
- Long roads without signal. The driver app has to keep working offline and send when the signal is back.
- Alerts before the complaint. A late trip should reach the office before the customer calls.
- Your accounting. Invoices, including ZATCA e-invoices, belong in your accounting system; a TMS shouldn't make you do them twice.
How Rabtan runs booked trips
Rabtan is a field operations system for Saudi companies whose work is a booked trip with a truck and a driver.
- Trip steps from the driver's phone. On the way, arrived at loading, arrived at delivery, done, each with its real time, even when the signal drops. A photo at the steps you choose, such as the delivery receipt.
- Late-trip alerts. Hasn't left after the booked time, arrived but not started, location signal stopped mid-trip, arrived more than 1 km from the site, finished without a photo: flagged automatically.
- A weekly driver report. For this week or last: on time and late, average lateness, trips, kilometres and hours per driver.
- Vehicle status. Active, no driver, or out of service with the reason and the workshop, and a warning 30 days before an Istemarah or Fahes runs out.
- A driver app in four languages. Arabic, English, Urdu and Bengali. It works offline, and drivers sign in with a mobile number, no email.
- The customer in the loop. A WhatsApp message when the truck arrives, and a rating on WhatsApp after the trip.
- No tracking device. Location comes from the driver's app during the working day's trips. Nothing at night, nothing on a day off.
What Rabtan doesn't do
- Multi-stop parcel routing. Rabtan is built for booked trips, one loading point and one delivery point, not routes with dozens of parcel stops or route optimisation.
- Invoicing. Rabtan records the quote, the payments and the finished job. Invoices stay in your accounting system.