Executive Summary
Logistics professionals understand that appointment scheduling can make or break carrier performance, and Diel-Jerue recognized both an opportunity and a clear need for improvement. The national refrigerated and dry goods transportation provider wanted to fundamentally change how their team handled one of logistics’ most time-consuming tasks: scheduling appointments by phone.
Their search for a scheduling partner brought them to Qued. Together, the two companies took Qued’s voice scheduling from an idea to production-ready reality, shaping a voice automation capability that fits the nuance and complexity of transportation scheduling instead of asking operations to bend around generic AI.
In less than 90 days, Diel-Jerue moved from concept to production and began automating scheduling at real scale. Here are the results at a glance:
Automated
90%+
of eligible voice scheduling
Eliminated
60 HRS/WK
of manual scheduling work
Scaled scheduling to
350+
facilities
The Perfect Innovation Sandbox
Not every customer is cut out to pioneer new technology. Diel-Jerue proved to be an exceptional customer for three critical reasons: their forward-thinking mindset, their commitment to real volume, and their readiness to dive in headfirst.
A key factor was Diel-Jerue’s willingness to get ambitious with the implementation. Instead of launching the new tool with a low-volume customer, they brought it to the table for one of their largest. The stakes were high, but Diel-Jerue and Qued believed in the vision.
That combination of vision and scale created the perfect opportunity to refine the solution. Diel-Jerue was Qued’s first customer to experience AI voice scheduling, and they jumped in immediately.
On the first load to run fully through Qued voice scheduling, Diel-Jerue needed 14 appointments. Very quickly, the impact was visible.
From Concept to Scalable Solution
The development process was not a typical vendor-client relationship. It was intentionally collaborative, with Diel-Jerue’s team deeply involved in shaping how the tool would work in practice.Qued worked closely with Diel-Jerue’s end users, recording actual calls and conducting working sessions to make sure the AI scheduling solution reflected real-world scheduling conversations, not idealized workflows.The goal wasn’t to deploy AI for AI’s sake. The teams rallied around a specific, measurable problem:
- Diel-Jerue was scheduling roughly 7,000 appointments a month across more than 350 different shippers and receivers
- Scheduling consumed about 60 hours per week, split between one full-time scheduler and another 20 hours spread across five people
- Roughly a third of those hours were tied to voice scheduling alone, with users juggling different rules, phone trees, and different expectations at every facility
The partnership focused on reclaiming those hours, standardizing how voice scheduling occurred, and reducing the training burden required to manage hundreds of location-specific rules. That collaboration set the blueprint for how Qued will build and deploy future voice integrations across the broader logistics market.
Seamless Integration, Real Impact
One of Qued’s core principles emerged clearly in this project: automation should feel invisible to end users. To support this principle, the AI voice scheduling solution pulls stop details and phone numbers directly from McLeod, Diel-Jerue’s transportation management system (TMS).
Instead of asking users to log into a new portal, Qued keeps schedulers working where they already live. Loads are created in McLeod as usual, then Qued takes over the heavy lifting of calling facilities, managing call backs, and capturing confirmations. The workflow is familiar, but the time spent on manual tasks drops dramatically so team members can refocus on higher value work like growing revenue, securing capacity, and monitoring market changes.
Whether the system sends an email or makes a phone call, Qued’s automation decides dynamically based on the facility’s capabilities and historical behavior. Diel-Jerue’s users simply see more appointments being scheduled faster, with fewer keystrokes and far less telephone time.
“Those who are taking full advantage of Qued in the operation are less distracted from their primary functions… like growing revenue, securing capacity, monitoring market changes.” – John Warrington, Director of Information Solutions at Diel-Jerue.
As a bonus, the timeline was remarkably fast for a first-of-its-kind product. Qued started building in June, and by early September – just a week before the McLeod Users Conference – the team had completed their first successful live call.
From Pilot to Platform
Diel-Jerue operates numerous locations, each with distinct scheduling requirements. Rather than manually mapping every facility’s rules, Qued built the system to learn automatically. This adaptive approach means the system becomes more capable over time, a crucial feature as Diel-Jerue’s network evolves.
The adoption curve speaks for itself. Since the partnership began, the percentage of all appointments scheduled by Qued has steadily climbed from roughly 2% of appointments in January to 40% by November. Voice scheduling, implemented in September, grew from a 5% baseline in August to 92% by November.
While Diel-Jerue’s integration created a foundation, Qued recognizes that voice scheduling isn’t one-size-fits-all. Scheduling needs are very specific and need to be customized to each client. The project provided invaluable insights on how to do just that for future releases.
Scheduling as Competitive Advantage
The urgency around appointment scheduling isn’t slowing down. Scheduling service-level agreements (SLA) are increasingly appearing in shipper RFPs, with carriers required to demonstrate how they’ll guarantee timely appointments. Some shippers are even asking which appointment-scheduling tool carriers use before awarding business.
Diel-Jerue’s willingness to innovate deliberately with Qued – and to implement AI with a clear operational purpose instead of chasing novelty – has created a tangible advantage. Today:
- A process that once consumed roughly 60 hours per week is nearly fully automated
- Voice now handles more than 90% of eligible scheduling calls
- Schedulers and account teams are less distracted from their primary functions, with automation absorbing the manual friction of booking and confirming appointments
In an environment where scheduling expectations keep rising, Diel-Jerue and Qued are showing what intentional, AI-powered voice scheduling looks like in practice: measurable efficiency gains, smoother operations, and a smarter way to turn scheduling into a strategic asset instead of a daily bottleneck.
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