A regional logistics operator ran its entire operating day from a wall-mounted whiteboard and a handful of shared spreadsheets. The whiteboard held the live picture of who was where; the spreadsheets held everything that had to be remembered after the marker was wiped. It worked, after a fashion, because two experienced coordinators carried most of it in their heads. The problem was what happened when either of them was on leave, or when both phones rang at once.
By the time the team came to us, the spreadsheets had quietly become the system of record, and nobody fully trusted them. The same load appeared on two tabs with different statuses. A driver would be marked free who was still an hour out. Billing chased details that had been wiped off the board days earlier.
The whiteboard was never the problem. The problem was that nothing remembered what the whiteboard used to say.
The challenges we had to solve
- The real workflow lived in two coordinators’ heads, not in any document we could read.
- Driver and vehicle availability were guessed from memory, so the same resource got double-booked.
- Once a job left the board, its history was gone, which left billing and customer queries unanswerable.
- Any new tool had to be faster than the whiteboard at the desk’s busiest hour, or it would be abandoned.
How we approached it
We started by sitting at the dispatch desk through a full shift, including the morning rush, rather than asking for a requirements document. That is where we learned why the whiteboard was laid out the way it was, and which shortcuts the coordinators relied on. We turned that into a single board view that mirrored the physical one, then added what the wall could never do: a live record of every job, availability that updated as statuses changed, and a history that survived the end of the day.
We delivered in small increments and kept the whiteboard running alongside until the desk trusted the tool. The first release did only assignment and status; collections, exception handling and the billing handoff came later, once the core was earning its place. We trained both coordinators and the people who cover for them, and left clear notes on how the board logic actually worked, so the knowledge no longer lived only in two heads.
Where it stands
The whiteboard has come down. A coordinator on leave is no longer a small crisis, and a job no longer disappears the moment it is done. When billing or a customer asks what happened with a load, the answer is in the system rather than in someone’s recollection. The desk still moves at its own pace, but the day no longer depends on two people remembering everything.