Fleet & Logistics Platform for Bal**** Roadlines, IndiaCase Study

Consignment status was established by calling the driver, which does not scale and produces no record. Customers increasingly expected tracking that the operator could not provide, and it was starting to cost them contracts. GST compliance was the harder problem: interstate freight requires e-way bills generated against consignment details with validity tied to distance, and the operator was producing these manually through the government portal, which was slow and error-prone, with mistakes creating genuine detention risk at checkposts. Billing had to produce correct GST invoices with the right place-of-supply treatment for interstate movements. The driver app was constrained by reality — drivers use inexpensive Android handsets, often several versions behind, on patchy connectivity across highway routes with genuine dead zones. An app requiring continuous connectivity or a recent device would simply not be used, and drivers would revert to phone calls. GPS devices were already fitted to vehicles by a third-party provider whose data had to be incorporated rather than replaced.

We built the driver application in React Native, targeting older Android versions deliberately and keeping the installed size small because drivers manage limited device storage. It works offline as the default assumption: consignment updates, proof-of-delivery capture and photographs are stored locally and sync when connectivity returns, with the driver never blocked by a missing network. The back end is Node.js on PostgreSQL, ingesting the existing third-party GPS feed and correlating positions with active consignments so tracking reflects the shipment rather than just the vehicle. E-way bill generation is integrated directly against the GST system, producing bills from consignment data already in the platform instead of re-entering it on the portal, with validity calculated from distance and alerts before expiry — that last detail addresses the detention risk that concerned the operator most. GST invoicing applies correct place-of-supply treatment for interstate movements automatically. Customers get a tracking link per consignment, which removed most status phone calls. We ran a pilot with a small group of drivers before wider rollout, which surfaced several usability problems on the actual handsets in use that no amount of emulator testing would have found. Office staff retain a manual e-way bill path for the exceptions that always exist in interstate freight, so an unusual consignment never blocks a vehicle waiting for the system to accommodate it. Related: mobile app development and our transport practice.