Spartan Puts AI Agents Into Live Operations

Kendrick Dawson, VP of Operations, on what Spartan automated and what they refuse to hand to a machine. Scroll down for Carlos Llanes Jr. on scaling Spartan from zero to $60M and winning Toyota.

Kendrick Dawson runs operations at Spartan Carrier Group. He came from Ryder. He owns dispatch, driver experience, customer reporting and the back office. He also built Spartan's AI workflows himself.

"Tech is not my first language by any means."

Spartan was one of the first fleets to put Alvys Foundry into live operations. Foundry is an agentic AI platform built inside the TMS (LINK TO FOUNDRY PAGE; INSERT OTHER PAGE LINKS WHERE RELEVANT, THIS HELPS SEARCH). Kendrick set up every workflow below, with support from the Alvys team.

Dispatchers stopped doing the mundane work. They became exception managers. Same headcount, three to four times the miles.

"I dump my SOPs, I dump my processes in there... now all of a sudden I scale my operational bandwidth without actually hiring more people."

Agentic workflows Spartan Carrier Group set up:

Customer tracking reports

Every customer wants a different template on a different cadence. Foundry pulls live ETAs, arrival and departure times and last known location out of Alvys TMS. Each customer gets their own format on their own schedule. That gives back about an hour per shift.

Coverage when a driver calls off

Foundry watches for any route with no driver assigned inside a four-hour buffer before dispatch. At that mark it emails every carrier that has run a similar route or originated near that pickup. Nobody has to notice the gap.

Detention pay by customer policy

One shipper pays $50 an hour after two hours. Another pays $35 after one. Foundry applies the right policy and flags what is owed. Kendrick reviews one report at the end of the week. Drivers do not lose money to a missed calculation.

Custom references as a translation layer

Field ops and dispatch describe the same event two different ways. Foundry resolves both into the answer finance actually understands. The same references push route detail and fuel info to the driver app.

And they will be building many more!

Bolt an outside AI platform onto your TMS and you hand another company your rates and your contact list. Kendrick calls Foundry a sandbox. Nothing leaks out. No false data comes in. Alvys runs SOC 2 compliant infrastructure and holds enterprise agreements with multiple LLM providers.

One thing stays human. Automating the mundane buys dispatchers time for drivers and hard problems. Driver retention is Spartan's competitive advantage. They are not trading it for efficiency.

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How Spartan Scaled to $75M on Alvys and Became a Toyota Preferred Carrier

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Just-in-time automotive freight leaves no room for error. Parts hit the assembly line on a schedule. Spartan's operation is complex by design. The software could not keep up.

Spartan ran through two or three TMS platforms before Alvys. Each one broke on the same problem.

"Some of the pain points we had with the legacy systems... they were unable to match the interchangeability between being people-centric, trailer-centric, tractor-centric."

Add cross-border. Enhanced customs brokerage and international milestones made the gaps worse. Then Spartan found Alvys.

"When we found Alvys, it was a game changer. They took the time to walk through every single pain point that we had. They knew exactly what needed to be done in order to get us out of that situation."

The fix held up under growth. Carlos wanted more than a patch.

"They were able to develop a solution that was not only scalable, it was agile and it was cost effective."

Then the time savings stacked up. Driver payroll used to take four days. Now it runs in about 36 hours. The engineering process ran on bulk upload templates. That dropped from three days to roughly 24 hours.

Load generation changed the most. Spartan now dumps a file straight into the system. Alvys parses every route. It builds the bid templates and profiles automatically.

"We used to take seven or eight people into just that one function, and it used to take forever. Now we can knock it out in a matter of like minutes."

One platform holds the whole stack together. Over 120 integrations keep every outside system in reach. Alvys tracks each late route. It flags what is missing a resource. Spartan's operations team classifies each one in real time.

Carlos wants a partner that moves as fast as he does.

"The systems are changing at such a rapid velocity that if you fall asleep for just a couple of days, you're lost. So having partners that are forward thinking is absolutely a competitive advantage."

Spartan is not slowing down. Neither is Alvys.