Fleet operations rebuilt around one live board
A regional carrier running dispatch off three spreadsheets and a phone. We replaced the lot with a single operations view their coordinators actually use.
The brief
Northwind moves freight across four states with a fleet of 60 vehicles. Dispatch was coordinated by hand: a shared spreadsheet for loads, a second for drivers, a third for maintenance, and a phone line to reconcile the three. Nobody could answer where a load was without making a call.
What was actually wrong
Every question about the day cost a phone call. Coordinators kept the real schedule in their heads, so a sick day put the depot back an hour, and the numbers the owners saw at the end of the month were assembled by hand from files that had already been overwritten. The company was not short of data, it was short of one place to look at it.
How we worked
- 01
Two weeks in the depot
We sat with dispatchers through a full cycle before designing anything. The spreadsheets turned out to encode about nine rules nobody had ever written down, and those rules became the spec.
- 02
One board, not five screens
Loads, drivers and vehicles went onto a single live board with the day on one axis. Anything a coordinator used to phone about became something they could see and drag.
- 03
Cut over depot by depot
The old spreadsheets stayed authoritative until each depot chose to switch. No big-bang migration, and no week where the business ran on a system it did not trust yet.
- 04
Handed over with the keys
Their ops lead now edits the rules, adds vehicle types and pulls the month-end numbers without us. We stayed on retainer for the first quarter and then stepped back.
What changed
The board became the depot's source of truth inside a month. Month-end reporting went from a two-day reconciliation to an export, and the coordinators stopped carrying the schedule in their heads.
“They learned our job before they wrote a line of code. The board looks like how we already worked, minus the parts that were held together by phone calls.”
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