One dispatch system replaced four tools and a whiteboard

Ferrous had grown from 40 loads a day to over 400 without changing how dispatch worked. The authoritative version of a load lived wherever it had last been touched: a spreadsheet for planning, one tool for driver messaging, another for invoicing, and a whiteboard for anything urgent.

The cost was not the licences. It was that nobody could answer 'where is load 8812' without three lookups and a phone call, and every invoice needed reconciling by hand against a system that had never agreed with itself.

We spent the first two weeks in the dispatch office, not in a design tool. The output was a map of the real workflow with every exception written down — including six that only happened at 4am and had never been documented anywhere.

Then we built against the exceptions first. A dispatch system that handles the clean path is a demo; the value is entirely in what happens when a driver breaks down or a load has to split across two trucks mid-route.

A single database record owns each load, with an append-only history so any load's past is reconstructable. Driver messaging and invoicing became downstream consumers rather than parallel sources of truth.

Multi-day loads and retried carrier handoffs run on a durable workflow engine, so a process spanning three days survives a deployment. The old tools stayed connected through adapters for two months, then were switched off one at a time.

Dispatchers work one screen. The whiteboard is gone. Invoicing reads the same record dispatch writes, so the monthly reconciliation that took two people three days no longer exists as a task.

Ferrous kept the codebase and runs it with two in-house engineers we trained during handover.