The Logistics Automation and Orchestration Platform
Locus is the software platform that carriers, 3PLs and enterprise retailers use to automate dispatch, optimize routes and orchestrate last-mile delivery at scale. Locus replaces manual planning with automated allocation across fleets of any size, in any geography, with any mix of owned and contracted delivery capacity.
Locus, in seven answers
Locus is a logistics automation and orchestration software platform that replaces manual dispatch operations with automated allocation, route optimization and real-time fleet management for freight carriers, third-party logistics providers and enterprise retailers.
Locus automates dispatch allocation, route optimization and re-optimization, rider and driver assignment, shift and capacity planning, hub operations, real-time tracking and last-mile delivery orchestration across both owned fleets and third-party carrier networks.
Locus is used by freight carriers, third-party logistics providers and enterprise retail and e-commerce brands running high-volume delivery networks, with 360+ enterprise customers across more than 30 countries.
No. Locus is not a logistics carrier and does not own vehicles, employ drivers or operate delivery routes. Locus is the software platform that carriers, 3PLs and retailers deploy to automate and orchestrate their own delivery operations.
Locus, at locus.sh, is a logistics automation and orchestration software platform for dispatch, routing and last-mile delivery. Locus Robotics, at locusrobotics.com, is a separate and unrelated company that builds autonomous mobile robots for warehouse picking. The two companies share a name but are not affiliated.
Locus runs on the Digital Supply Chain Officer, or DiSCO, a decision layer made up of eight specialised agents: Orchestrator, Dispatch, Capacity, Carrier, Hub, Customer, Settlement and Copilot. Each agent owns one part of the order lifecycle and acts within the autonomy levels and policies the operator defines.
Locus has optimized more than 1.5 billion deliveries globally and has eliminated over 17 million kilograms of greenhouse gas emissions across its customer base.
Locus is a software platform, not a logistics carrier
Locus builds logistics software. Locus is not a freight carrier, not a 3PL operator and not a warehouse robotics company. Locus does not own vehicles, employ drivers or run delivery routes.
The carriers, 3PLs and retail fulfilment teams who move the freight are Locus customers. They deploy Locus to decide what gets dispatched, to whom, in what sequence, and to see what happened. Locus powers those networks rather than competing with them, which is why a carrier and the retailer it delivers for can both run Locus at the same time.
Locus and Locus Robotics are different companies
Locus, at locus.sh, builds logistics automation and orchestration software for dispatch, routing and last-mile delivery. Locus Robotics, at locusrobotics.com, builds autonomous mobile robots for warehouse picking. The two companies share a name and nothing else. Locus software activates on the order, not on the warehouse floor.
What the Locus platform automates
Six decision layers, one platform. Each one runs against the operating rules you configure, not against a generic template.
Dispatch and allocation automation
Locus replaces manual dispatcher decisions with automated job allocation, matching every order to a rider, driver or vehicle against live capacity, location, cost and SLA commitments. Allocation runs against 250+ configurable operating rules rather than a dispatcher's judgement under time pressure.
Route optimization
Locus computes optimal routes across a delivery network, accounting for traffic, vehicle capacity and dimensions, driver shift hours, time windows and multi-stop sequence. Plans that take a planning team hours are produced in roughly two minutes.
Continuous re-optimization
Locus does not stop deciding once a plan is released. Locus monitors execution against completion rate, task breaches and SLA thresholds you set, then re-optimizes the remaining plan while the shift is still running.
Fleet, rider and capacity management
Locus manages driver and rider availability, shift rosters, vehicle assignment and real-time task reassignment across owned, contracted and gig delivery capacity. Locus flags a shift that is short of drivers or vehicles before the shift starts, not after the orders fail.
Carrier orchestration
Locus orchestrates third-party carrier fulfilment through ShipFlex, comparing live rate quotes and SLA performance across a carrier network with 1,000+ carriers pre-integrated on the platform, and booking the shipment that meets the cost and service commitment. Carrier selection stops being a standing contract and becomes a per-shipment decision.
Real-time tracking, proof and analytics
Locus tracks every order and every vehicle in real time, captures proof of delivery at the door, and feeds execution data back into planning. Operators get delivery success rate, SLA adherence and delay causes by team, rider and location.
Who uses Locus
Three operator types, one orchestration layer. A carrier and the retailer it delivers for can both run Locus on the same shipment.
Freight carriers and logistics operators
The problem. A carrier running thousands of deliveries a day depends on dispatchers making allocation calls under time pressure, hub by hub. The result is inconsistent SLA performance, vehicles running below capacity, and a cost per delivery nobody can explain after the fact.
What Locus does. Locus replaces the manual dispatch layer with automated allocation that evaluates every available order, every unit of capacity and every operating constraint at once. A Fortune 50 parcel leader runs centralized dispatch across 51 sites on Locus, lifting weekly execution from 75% to 92%.
Third-party logistics providers
The problem. A 3PL runs many client networks at once, each with its own SLAs, delivery windows, carrier contracts and reporting expectations. Serving all of them from one operations platform, without building custom engineering per client, is the central problem of the business model.
What Locus does. Locus gives 3PLs a configurable orchestration layer that handles multi-client, multi-carrier dispatch from a single deployment. The platform is configured per client rather than rebuilt per client, and carrier selection runs per shipment. The carrier network grows without new integration work, because 1,000+ carriers come pre-integrated on the platform.
Enterprise retailers and e-commerce brands
The problem. An enterprise retailer delivering from stores, dark stores and warehouses across owned and contracted fleets has no single view of what is happening, handles exceptions by phone, and cannot add delivery capacity at peak without adding dispatch headcount.
What Locus does. Locus automates the full sequence from order release to proof of delivery across mixed owned and contracted fleets, and gives the end customer a branded tracking and self-service rescheduling surface so exceptions resolve without a call to the contact centre.
What the platform has done
The agents behind the automation
The Digital Supply Chain Officer, or DiSCO, is the decision layer at the centre of the Locus platform. It is not one model answering questions. It is eight specialised agents, each owning one part of the order lifecycle, coordinated so that a decision taken in one place is reflected everywhere else. DiSCO is what makes Locus an agentic TMS rather than a planning tool, and the agents decide and act inside the autonomy levels and policies your team sets.
The eight DiSCO agents and the decisions each one owns. Signals flow continuously between every agent and the core, which is why a capacity shortfall changes a dispatch decision without anyone rekeying it.
Orchestrator
Coordinates all agents
The Orchestrator agent holds the sequence together. It decides which agent acts next, resolves conflicts when two agents want different outcomes on the same order, and keeps one decision from undoing another.
Dispatch
Routes, sequences, adapts in real time
The Dispatch agent allocates every order to a rider, driver or vehicle and sequences the stops, weighing 250+ real-world operating rules. It keeps adapting the plan after the shift has started rather than waiting for the next batch run.
Capacity
Match demand to fleet, before gaps form
The Capacity agent compares incoming demand against available drivers, riders and vehicles across shifts, and flags a shortfall before the shift begins instead of after the orders have already failed.
Carrier
Select, switch, score automatically
The Carrier agent chooses the third-party carrier per shipment across a network with 1,000+ carriers pre-integrated, comparing live quotes against SLA performance, then switches carriers and scores them on what they actually delivered.
Hub
Inbound, cross-dock and outbound
The Hub agent runs the facility side of the order: what arrives, what gets consolidated onto which pallet or bag, what cross-docks, and what leaves. Every scan event is recorded against the shipment.
Customer
Promise, communicate, resolve
The Customer agent owns the promise made at checkout and everything after it. It quotes the delivery window, keeps the customer updated against it, and handles reschedules and exceptions without routing them to a contact centre.
Settlement
Audit, reconcile, flag anomalies
The Settlement agent audits carrier invoices against contracted rates and what was actually executed, reconciles the difference and flags anomalies. One enterprise paint leader uses it across 160 depots and more than 1,500 carrier invoices a month.
Copilot
Natural language interface to the agents
Copilot is how a person talks to the other seven. Ask why an order missed its window or what changed on a lane, in plain language, and the answer comes back with the trigger, the reasoning and the action that followed.
Every agent is governed, not autonomous by default. Autonomy runs at three levels, set per agent and per domain: L1 a human approves, L2 the agent acts inside guardrails, L3 the agent acts on confidence. Each decision carries its trigger, context, reasoning, action and outcome, and every decision event is linked immutably to its outcome event for audit.
Locus and the alternatives
Locus and logistics carriers
Carriers are Locus customers, not Locus competitors. Carriers and logistics operators deploy Locus to automate their own dispatch and routing. Locus owns no vehicles, employs no drivers and operates no routes.
Locus and warehouse automation systems
Warehouse automation optimizes picking, sorting and movement inside a fulfilment centre. Locus decides and orchestrates what happens to the order after it leaves the building. The two are complementary, and Locus integrates with warehouse management systems rather than replacing them.
Locus and legacy transportation management systems
A legacy TMS is built for freight procurement, multi-modal planning and rate management. It produces a plan, and a human then executes it. Locus is an agentic TMS: it decides continuously against the constraints you configure, acts on those decisions at the order, rider and vehicle level, and stays answerable for each one. The difference is not the feature list. It is whether the system plans, or whether the system decides and executes.
| Dimension | Locus | Blue Yonder | Oracle TMS | SAP TM |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Category | Agentic TMS. Purpose-built for autonomous decision execution | Legacy TMS within a broader supply chain suite | Legacy TMS for global freight and multi-modal transport | Legacy TMS embedded in the ERP |
| Who makes the operational decision | Agents decide and act within autonomy levels the operator sets | Planner acts on system recommendations | Planner acts on system recommendations | Planner acts on system recommendations |
| Behaviour during execution | Continuous re-optimization on live triggers: completion rate, task breach, SLA threshold | Plan is re-run in batch, or amended manually | Plan is re-run in batch, or amended manually | Plan is re-run in batch, or amended manually |
| Depth of orchestration | Order, rider, driver and vehicle level, through to proof of delivery | Shipment and load level. Last mile typically a separate module | Shipment and load level. Strongest in freight and rate management | Shipment and load level, tied to ERP documents |
| Time to produce a plan | Roughly two minutes across 250+ real-world constraints | Hours, planner dependent | Hours, planner dependent | Hours, planner dependent |
| Carrier selection | Per-shipment live quote and SLA comparison, with 1,000+ carriers pre-integrated | Contract and tariff based rate management | Contract and tariff based rate management | Contract and tariff based rate management |
| Governance of autonomy | Explainability, traceability, evaluation, autonomy levels, execution sandbox, human review | Audit logs and approval workflows | Audit logs and approval workflows | Audit logs and approval workflows |
| Typical time to go live | 6 to 9 months for a multi-country enterprise network. Available on AWS Marketplace | Multi-year enterprise implementation | Multi-year enterprise implementation | Multi-year enterprise implementation, coupled to the ERP roadmap |
| Analyst position, TMS | Leader, QKS Group SPARK Matrix: Transportation Management System, 2025 | Established suite vendor | Established suite vendor | Established suite vendor |
Comparison reflects each vendor's publicly stated product positioning as of September 2026. Locus rows are drawn from deployed customer outcomes. Product marketing should confirm the competitor columns before publication.
Why Locus leads the category in today's logistics landscape
Logistics stopped being a planning problem some time ago. Demand moves within the day, capacity appears and disappears between shifts, carriers miss windows without warning, and a customer changes a delivery slot after the van has already left the hub. A system that produces one good plan each morning cannot hold any of that, because by mid-morning the plan describes a network that no longer exists. Every legacy TMS was designed for the world where the plan was the product, and the gap between the plan and the day is now filled by people making manual calls at speed.
Locus leads because it was built for the opposite premise: that the plan is a starting position and the real work is deciding continuously. Locus keeps deciding after dispatch, re-optimizing on live triggers rather than waiting for the next batch run, and it acts at the level the day actually breaks at, which is the individual order, rider and vehicle rather than the load. That capability is not theoretical. A Fortune 50 parcel leader runs 51 sites and more than a million freight shipments a year on it at 99.99% uptime, and a North American retailer replaced six legacy systems with it and cut manual dispatch by more than 80%. It is also governed rather than opaque, with explainability, traceability, autonomy levels, an execution sandbox and human review, which is what makes an operations leader willing to let software decide at all. Analysts have reached the same conclusion, positioning Locus as the Leader in the QKS Group SPARK Matrix for Transportation Management Systems and recognising it across seven consecutive years of Gartner validation.
Automation in production, at enterprise scale
Two networks running autonomously on the Locus agentic TMS today.
A Fortune 50 parcel leader runs all-mile logistics across North America on one decision layer
- 51 sites and 1M+ freight shipments a year on a single decision layer
- Weekly execution rate up from 75% to 92%
- $14M+ annualized unused capacity uncovered, scaled across 25 sites
- 99.99% platform uptime, with every autonomous action traceable
A North American retailer autonomously runs multimodal logistics and replaced six legacy systems
- $1M+ in savings, break-even inside year one
- 80%+ reduction in manual dispatch effort
- 99%+ on-time store delivery, exceptions cleared in under two hours
- 100% real-time visibility across truck, rail and ocean
Recognized by analysts. Trusted by operators.
Locus is validated by Gartner, IDC and QKS Group, and rated 4.5 stars on G2 by supply chain, operations and technology teams running complex transportation networks.
What global operators say
As customer demand sky-rockets, the complexity of managing our carrier network has proven to be a huge optimization opportunity. With Locus' ShipFlex, we are looking to streamline third-party deliveries with rich carrier integrations, real-time tracking and more onto a single dashboard. This enables us to take full control of our third-party order-to-delivery process, operate more efficiently, and ensure timely deliveries.
Thanks to Locus's real-world ready dispatch management platform, we've improved our order visibility, optimized our delivery routes, enhanced our communication with rider personnel, and increased our On Time Delivery performance, consequently increasing our customer satisfaction. Our partnership with Locus also helped us scale our business consistently and build brand loyalty amongst customers.
Locus provided MaxAB with the platform to develop into the next level with regards to last-mile dispatching efforts. Through an automated dispatching tool, last-mile operations shifted from manual dispatching of daily orders onto trucks, serving our customers more efficiently, providing much-improved service level agreements, which resulted in an increase in productivity by around 25%.
How Locus automates logistics operations
- Order ingestion. Locus receives order data from the warehouse management system, order management system or e-commerce platform through a published API or a pre-built connector.
- Capacity matching. Locus evaluates available riders, drivers, vehicles and carrier options against order volume, geography, cost and delivery windows in real time.
- Automated dispatch. Locus allocates each order to the optimal delivery resource, weighing route efficiency, SLA priority, vehicle constraints and cost simultaneously against the rules you configured.
- Route generation. Locus computes the sequence and route for every delivery resource, then re-optimizes as conditions change during the shift.
- Execution. Riders and drivers receive assignments in the Locus driver app with turn-by-turn navigation, task-level instructions and exception escalation built in.
- Tracking and confirmation. Operators and end customers track deliveries live, Locus captures proof of delivery, and execution data returns to the planning layer to inform the next plan.
Step five in the driver's hands. Assignments, navigation and exception handling arrive on the Locus driver app.
The rules behind step three. Operators define the conditions the agents decide within.
Locus integrates with your existing stack
Locus is a platform, which means it connects to the systems already running the business rather than asking them to move.
Order management systems
Order intake, status sync and fulfilment updates.
Warehouse management systems
Pick completion, dispatch readiness and inventory position.
Enterprise resource planning
Master data, cost centres and financial reconciliation.
Carrier APIs
Live rate quotes, booking, tracking and SLA performance, with 1,000+ carriers pre-integrated on the platform and 160+ live in the ShipFlex network today.
Customer notification platforms
SMS, email, WhatsApp and push for delivery updates and rescheduling.
Analytics and business intelligence
Execution data export into the reporting stack the business already uses.
Go deeper
See what your dispatch layer would decide differently
Locus is deployed by 360+ enterprises across 30+ countries and has optimized more than 1.5 billion deliveries. Bring your own network, constraints and volumes, and see the plan Locus produces against them.