A live dashboard for a regional freight carrier

Northgate Freight moves pallets for manufacturers and wholesalers across four states. Its dispatchers are very good at their jobs, but the tools around them had not changed in fifteen years.

The problem

Dispatch ran on a whiteboard, a radio and a GPS portal that showed dots on a map and nothing else. To answer “where is the Hendry load?”, a dispatcher had to find the truck, call the driver and check a spreadsheet of delivery windows.

The pain points we heard most in week one:

• No single view of which loads were running late
• Customers calling for updates that dispatch could not give quickly
• Driver hours tracked by hand, close to the legal limit more often than anyone liked
• The GPS portal slowed to a crawl at 7am, exactly when it was needed most

What we shipped

We sat with the dispatch team for two early shifts before writing a plan. The scope came down to one question: what does a dispatcher need to see in the first five seconds?

The answer became a single dashboard with three columns: loads at risk, loads on time and trucks waiting for work. Around it we built:

1. A live feed from the existing GPS provider, matched to each load and its delivery window
2. An at-risk rule that flags a load when its arrival estimate passes the window
3. A driver-hours panel that warns two hours before a limit, not after
4. A customer status link, so shippers can check a load without calling
5. A simple history, so the Monday review uses real numbers instead of memory

Speed mattered more than anything else. The dashboard has to load instantly on an old office PC at 7am, so we kept the page light, cached what we could, and measured every release against a fixed budget.

How it went

Dispatchers stopped using the whiteboard in the second week. Late deliveries fell because problems showed up early enough to fix, usually by swapping a load to a nearby truck.

Inbound “where is my load” calls dropped once customers had their own status link. The Monday review now takes twenty minutes and starts from a chart rather than an argument.

What’s next

Northgate is adding a second depot in the spring. We are extending the dashboard to show both depots side by side, and testing a simple driver app for proof-of-delivery photos.