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

Dispatch was the daily bottleneck. Allocations lived on a whiteboard, so the true state of the operation existed in one room and nowhere else. Drivers, and account managers taking customer calls, worked from phone calls and guesswork, and simple status questions meant walking into the traffic office or ringing a driver mid-route.

Commercially, job profitability could not be known in a useful timeframe. Customer rates sat in one spreadsheet and subcontractor rates in another, so real cost only surfaced when subcontractor invoices were reconciled by hand against jobs completed weeks earlier. Without a shared record of what had been agreed for each job, disputes with subcontractors were routine. Vehicle running costs sat in Xero with no link to the work that generated them.

Compliance carried its own risk. Maintenance and inspection records were tracked in a spreadsheet nobody trusted to be current, a weak position for an operator-licence holder answerable to the Traffic Commissioner. The market offered no easy alternative either: commercial transport systems were either priced for much larger fleets or could not model a mixed own-fleet and subcontractor operation.

PapaSiddhi 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 appear in one shared view that updates for everyone simultaneously. The data model treats the mixed own-fleet and subcontractor operation as the default case, with customer rate cards and subcontractor rate agreements as first-class records, so allocating a job establishes both revenue and committed cost at that moment. Google Maps Platform calculates distances for mileage-rated work.

Subcontractor self-billing, an arrangement HMRC permits where both parties agree to it, generates each payment record from the agreed rate and the completed job, giving both sides the same source of truth. Through the Xero API, the platform pushes sales invoices and subcontractor bills with correct nominal coding, using idempotent sync logic so a retry can never create duplicate entries. Xero remains the ledger of record, so VAT reporting under Making Tax Digital stays where the bookkeeper already manages it. Vehicle compliance, covering MOT, inspection and maintenance scheduling, moved into the platform with forward alerts.

Because a haulier cannot pause operations for a cutover, the team migrated live jobs and open subcontractor commitments rather than starting from a clean slate. Historical rate agreements were also brought across, so margin comparisons with earlier periods remain meaningful. Cutover was planned around the working week, with the traffic office running the new board alongside existing records until the team was satisfied that every open job had transferred correctly.