Leaving 30 years on TMW.suite behind

Sherri Garner Brumbaugh, president, CEO, and owner, runs a carrier her parents started with one truck. Vern and Jean Garner founded Garner Trucking in 1960. Her dad drove by day. Her mom dispatched from the kitchen table by night. Sixty-five years later, the fleet runs close to 100 trucks across the Midwest.

"We are the true American story," Sherri says.

She also spent decades as the company's IT lead. "I'm a teacher by trade and a trucker by heritage," she says. She bought the first system back in the DOS days. She carried it through Windows 95, Y2K, and the move to the cloud. That legacy TMS ran Garner for more than 30 years.

It worked. It just stopped keeping up.

"It was working very well, but just didn't feel like they were keeping up with the latest trends," Sherri says. "Every time we wanted a new report, it was costly. It took a long time. We just didn't feel that the response was there."

The gaps added up. New reports cost money and time. Support lagged when Garner needed answers. The team reached the system through a remote desktop, and the connection dropped. A ransomware attack once shut Garner down for three days.

So Sherri went looking for a modern platform. She landed on Alvys. Garner flipped the switch the day of this interview.

"We're going live just today. Today was our live moment. And I didn't get a call. So I think that's a good day," Sherri says.

Adoption moved fast. Sherri sat in on one training session.

"I'm not going to be the day-to-day user of the operation software. But I did sit in on training and I do believe that I could sit down day one after that training and put an order in, create an order, and dispatch a truck. I am confident I could do that."

Her team moved faster than she did. "My Garner team had brief training on the new software and they were ready to go," she says. The morale surprised her. "I'm just seeing them collaborating and talking and just the excitement of something new."

The work got quicker in ways her dispatchers felt right away. During training, a dispatcher added a shipper with one number. The order filled itself in.

"It pre-populated the whole order just like my dispatcher was thinking about where that truck was going to go," Sherri says.

Then there is the AI. Alvys reads the load board and suggests the next move. "The AI in the background said, 'Okay, dispatcher, you thought that this was the best one, but over here you might want to think about this,'" Sherri says. "That's where the AI piece of this software is going to be something just unique to our operation."

Garner is pulling scattered tools into one system. Operations, accounting, HR, safety, maintenance, and the driver app now share one screen. "With the implementation of Alvys, we could eliminate an outsider or a different third party and bring it all under one place," Sherri says.

The driver app was a hard requirement. Garner would not move without it. Alvys built the pieces Garner needed. "We're not going to go backwards without having a mobile piece. And Alvys stepped up and got it done for us," Sherri says. Now drivers see their next load, their route, and their timing 24/7/365. Samsara geofencing logs each arrival and departure on its own. "It automatically pings the truck where it's at and then it populates it in the field," she says.

Cloud access changed the math too. Any dispatcher, any internet connection, any Saturday night. "They can pull up their mobile and solve a problem. We didn't have that kind of ability with our previous software. So it's going to be a game changer for us," Sherri says.

The savings show up in the budget. "When we budget this next year, we are budgeting for a reduction in our IT expense, and Alvys is going to allow us to do that," Sherri says.

"We know Alvys is going to save us money compared to our previous TMS."

Sherri now sits on the Alvys Customer Advisory Board. She wants the platform built around how truckers actually work. "We're truckers. We are going to use it differently. You need to hear the good, the bad, and the ugly. So that's why I'm here."

Sixty-five years in, Garner Trucking still hauls freight the family way. Now the software finally keeps up.