Transport Operations & Dispatch ERP for Sev*** Transport, ScotlandCase Study

Dispatch was the daily bottleneck. Allocations were made on a whiteboard in the traffic office, which meant the current state of the operation existed in one room and nowhere else — anyone away from that board, including drivers and the account manager fielding customer calls, was working from a phone call and a guess. Commercially, job profitability was unknowable in any useful timeframe. Customer rates sat in one spreadsheet and subcontractor rates in another, and actual cost only became visible when subcontractor invoices arrived and were reconciled by hand against jobs completed weeks earlier. Disputes with subcontractors were routine because no shared record existed of what had been agreed for a given job. Vehicle running costs sat in Xero with no link to the jobs that generated them. The operator held an operator licence, with maintenance and inspection records tracked in a spreadsheet nobody trusted to be current. Off-the-shelf transport systems were either priced for far larger fleets or could not model a mixed own-fleet and subcontractor operation.

We built a React and Node.js platform on PostgreSQL centred on a live dispatch board that replaced the whiteboard — jobs, vehicles, drivers and subcontractor allocations in one view, updating for everyone at once rather than living in the traffic office. Job entry through to invoicing runs in one system, designed around the mixed own-fleet and subcontractor model as the default case rather than an exception. Customer rate cards and subcontractor rate agreements are both first-class objects, so allocating a job establishes revenue and committed cost at that moment rather than weeks later — that single change is what made live job margin possible. Subcontractor self-billing generates the payment record from the agreed rate and the completed job, which removed most dispute traffic because both parties work from the same record. Google Maps provides distance calculation for mileage-rated jobs. The Xero integration pushes sales invoices and subcontractor bills with correct nominal coding, using idempotent handling because duplicate invoices in an accounting system are considerably worse than a failed sync. Vehicle compliance — MOT, inspection and maintenance scheduling — moved into the platform with forward alerts. We migrated live jobs and open subcontractor commitments rather than starting from a clean slate, since a transport operator cannot pause work for a cutover, and historical rate agreements came across so margin comparisons against prior periods remain meaningful. Related: custom software development, ERP integration, and our transport practice.