Matthew Monaco

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Case study · Dispatch · BVR/TMS

Rethinking dispatch across multiple regions and services

Saved $30k a month in labour and management costs

The dispatch planning tool on a laptop. A list of routes with stop counts and durations sits beside a map of Houston showing each route as a coloured line.

Key initiatives

  1. Increase dispatcher satisfaction.
  2. Reduce operating costs through less time spent managing routes and fewer drivers and vehicles by better using capacity.
  3. Grow volume 2× without having to scale staff significantly, or at all.

Context

Tools that seem broken or poorly designed often worked well at a particular time and place; circumstances shifted underneath them and exposed cracks that simply weren’t a consideration before. That was the case here. The dispatch and planning tool worked well for a time, but as the business grew, changed and pivoted, the product needed to catch up. The design team had also been introducing new patterns across the org, and dispatch was ready to use them.

Two laptops showing the planning tool. The front one lists appointments with customer names and time windows beside a map of Houston dotted with appointment pins.
Appointments are the main entity in last-mile logistics.

Approach

User testing, performance metrics and usability metrics showed where users felt pain, real or perceived, and where time was lost to duplicate work, manual intervention and other inefficiencies, and how that could translate into money saved.

Digging into satisfaction showed it greatly affected cost. The UX wasn’t necessarily poor, but the perception of the system’s output was: misplaced doubts about routing and assignment led to duplicate work and net-negative changes to system-generated plans. So the goal became improving how system-generated content is displayed and surfacing the impact of changes. For example, whenever a dispatcher manually changes a route generated by the routing engine, the tool shows the impact on that route’s metrics and asks them to confirm.

The tracking view for Toronto: a list of active routes with delivery progress bars beside a map, and summary panels for routes behind schedule and appointment failures.
A desktop monitor showing one route being tracked: its ordered stops with completion status beside a map of the driver's path through Toronto and route timing stats.
Tracking drivers on the road helps dispatchers catch potential issues early.

A four-day design sprint brought in ops leaders, business leaders, sales and other stakeholders to build a broader vision for the product within the business.

A laptop showing a route's stop list with one stop selected, opening a details panel with the customer's address, service level, packages and tracking numbers.

We then worked closely with product managers and engineers to hand off that vision and keep evangelizing and protecting it, solving constraints alongside engineering rather than being dictated by them. The work shipped in phases, each with targeted product and business goals, so we kept iterating instead of being captured by our first idea.

Outcomes

  • $30k/month Saved in labour and management costs

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