Logistics Tracking Dashboard

01The challenge:

A tracking page that was wrong about one stop in eight

SwiftShip runs 45 vans out of two depots for retailers and medical suppliers across the metro area. Its tracking page came from an off-the-shelf courier tool fed by drivers tapping status buttons, and our audit found about one stop in eight showed the wrong status or a location more than an hour old.

Customers who could not trust the page called dispatch instead, roughly 300 times a day, and the two dispatchers answering them were the same people building tomorrow's routes by hand. Retail clients began asking for delivery proof SwiftShip could not produce, and one of them put its contract out to bid.

02What we built:

Every van reports its own position, and every delivery needs proof

Drivers use a Next.js web app on their phones that streams GPS every 15 seconds over a WebSocket to a Node.js service, which stores each ping in MongoDB. A stop can only be marked delivered within 100 meters of the address and with a photo or signature attached, so status and location have to match.

Each morning the Google Maps API orders every driver's stops by distance, time windows and van capacity, and dispatchers drag stops between routes when a driver calls in sick. When a van is two stops away, the customer gets a text with a live map link, and the dashboard flags any van that stops reporting.

03What changed:

Tracking is right on 99.5% of stops, and the phones went quiet

Tracking accuracy, checked against photo and signature proof, reached 99.5%, up from about 88% before the rebuild. Calls asking where a delivery was dropped by roughly 70% within two months, and the dispatchers now spend their afternoons planning routes instead of reading out statuses over the phone.

The retail client that had opened its contract to bids renewed for two years on the strength of the delivery proof. SwiftShip's dispatch lead controls driver accounts, depots and client settings. Monitoring, routing weights and new notification templates stay with us on a rolling monthly agreement.