Harbor Logistics
Cut manual dispatch time from 6 hours to 40 minutes.
Harbor Logistics runs freight dispatch across 12 depots in western India. Their ops team was manually reconciling orders, vehicle assignments, and delivery confirmations every morning — a process that took six people, six hours, and produced errors anyway.
Six people. Six hours. Every morning.
Harbor's dispatch process lived across three spreadsheets, two WhatsApp groups, and one Google Form that nobody had updated in eight months. Each morning, the ops team manually matched incoming orders to available vehicles, then notified drivers via WhatsApp, then updated a master sheet, then fixed the errors from the day before. By the time the morning run was coordinated, half the day was gone. Priya, the COO, had tried two different off-the-shelf logistics tools. Neither integrated with their existing ERP. Both had been abandoned.
One system. Automated from order to confirmation.
We spent the first week mapping every manual step and every data source. The actual automation logic wasn't complicated — the hard work was integrating with their existing ERP (SAP B1) and building a reliable vehicle-availability API on top of their GPS tracking vendor's data. We built a dispatch engine that runs automatically every morning at 5am and a web dashboard for the ops team to review exceptions, override assignments, and track live status.
- →Automated order-to-vehicle matching via custom dispatch engine
- →SAP Business One integration via custom middleware
- →Live GPS tracking feed from existing vendor, unified into one view
- →WhatsApp Business API for driver notifications (replacing manual messages)
- →Exception dashboard: only the edge cases reach a human
- →Daily reconciliation report generated automatically, emailed by 6am
The morning ops meeting was cancelled after week 3.
The first two weeks were rough — the SAP integration surfaced data quality issues that had been invisible in the manual process. We fixed them in the source. By week 4, the ops team had stopped checking the dashboard before 8am because there was nothing to check. Priya told us the team used the reclaimed hours to build the client relationship work they'd been postponing for two years.
- →Daily dispatch time: 6 hours → 40 minutes (exceptions only)
- →Manual reconciliation: 4 days/month → fully automated
- →Driver notification time: 45 minutes → 90 seconds
- →Order error rate: 4.2% → 0.3% (most errors were manual entry)
- →Ops team headcount reallocated to client-facing roles
What they walked away with.
- →Dispatch automation engine (Node.js, runs on cron)
- →Web dashboard for ops team (Next.js)
- →SAP B1 middleware integration
- →WhatsApp Business API integration
- →Daily reconciliation report system
- →GitHub repo (theirs), full documentation
- →Notion handover + runbook
- →30-day post-launch support
The tools we used.
They rebuilt our ops backend in 7 weeks. We used to lose 4 days a month to manual reconciliation. Now it's zero.
Priya R.
COO, Harbor Logistics