The load-posting converter.

The problem

Posting container loads to the DAT load board went through an old Excel macro workbook: refresh the TMS, download the export, paste, upload. About five minutes a cycle, many cycles a day. And the macro had a habit: every so often it looked at a weight like 2500 and decided it was a date. The posting went live offering freight that weighed November 4, 1906. Spreadsheet automation fails silently, in the middle of live commercial data, and the cost is a phone call you never knew you missed.

How it works

• Reads the TMS shipment data and emits load-board bulk-posting files, every field derived by code that cannot reinterpret a weight as a date.
• Every run emits the full set of loads still inside their posting window, because the board is wiped and re-uploaded each cycle. Incomplete rows are skipped by name and self-heal on a later run once their data arrives.
• Rates are deterministic: an owner-editable percentage of the sell rate, truncated to whole dollars. Output splits at 50 rows per file because the load board's bulk upload gets flaky above 80.
• Since August the converter pulls the board straight from a TMS report, so one pull feeds every board at once and the file upload step is gone.
• Every processed export archives itself. Nothing is deleted, ever.

// a weight can never become a date again; every field is derived, not reinterpreted

The result

4,342 loads posted across 442 batches with zero corrupted fields in the tool's first days of life alone. Each posting cycle went from five minutes to seconds, and it is now the first step of the refresh bot's 15-minute cycle.