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Software for Logistics and Distribution

The gap between what left the gate and what was invoiced

Most distribution businesses have visibility at exactly two moments: the goods left, and the goods arrived. Everything between those points is a phone call.

That is survivable until something goes wrong, which it does on a predictable proportion of consignments. Then the questions start — what was loaded, what arrived, who signed, when was the damage noticed — and the answers live on paper that has gone travelling with a driver.

What breaks here

  1. Nothing is visible between the two ends

    A consignment is dispatched and then nobody knows anything until it is delivered or a customer complains. Your office spends its day answering “where is my material” with a best guess and a promise to call back.

  2. Proof of delivery is a piece of paper

    Signed at the gate, carried in a cab, handed in days later, and occasionally not at all. When a payment is disputed six weeks on, the document that settles it is the one nobody can find.

  3. Damage and shortage are settled by argument

    The customer says four cartons were broken; the driver remembers two; nobody photographed anything. The evidence had to be captured at the moment of delivery and it was not, so the claim is resolved by whoever is more persistent.

  4. Dispatched, invoiced and received are three different numbers

    Reconciling them is a monthly exercise involving several spreadsheets and at least one uncomfortable conversation. The discrepancies are usually small and individually explicable, which is exactly why nobody fixes the cause.

  5. Drivers and field staff have no workable tool

    Anything requiring a stable connection fails where it is needed — in a basement, a yard, a village, a godown with no signal. So the process falls back to paper, and the digital system is updated later from memory.

  6. Freight cost per order is unknown until month end

    You find out which orders lost money after the month they lost it, by which time the same pricing has been quoted another hundred times.

What we build for it

  • Dispatch-to-delivery tracking with a status at each hop, not only at the two ends
  • Digital proof of delivery — signature, photograph, time and location captured where the handover happens
  • Damage and shortage as a workflow, with the evidence attached at the point it is observed and the claim following a route rather than a phone call
  • Reconciliation reporting across dispatched, invoiced and received, so the difference is visible weekly rather than discovered monthly
  • Driver and field applications that work offline, holding what was captured and syncing when a connection returns
  • Customer-facing status, so the question stops arriving at your office by phone
  • Freight cost allocated per order, available while the pricing decision still matters
  • Integration with the transport and ERP systems you already run

What this means for your project

We build for weak connectivity as the normal case, not the exception. A logistics tool that assumes a signal is a tool that will be abandoned in the first week by the people it was built for, and nobody will tell you why.

Evidence gets captured where it is created. A photograph taken at the gate settles a dispute. A note typed at head office three days later does not. Most of the value in a system like this comes from moving the moment of capture, not from better reports.

We would rather fix the reconciliation than add dashboards. If dispatched, invoiced and received do not agree, every report built on top of them inherits the disagreement.

Much of what we know here came from building materials, where goods are heavy, breakage is routine, and what left the factory and what the dealer admits receiving have never quite matched.

The other industries we work in

Tell us what you move

Describe your consignments, your network and the argument you are tired of having, and we will tell you how we would approach it.

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Tell us what you are building

We will tell you how we would approach it, and whether we are the right fit.

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