Context
Romexpress Inc is a road freight carrier based in Cleveland, Ohio, delivering across the United States. We built three things for it, one after another: an internal system for its people, trucks and routes, the company website, and the board on which dispatch sees its week.
The challenge: the dispatch week
Dispatch kept its week in a spreadsheet. Each order carried the internal number, the load number from the broker, the driver picking up, the driver delivering, the pickup and delivery cities, and the day and time of every stop. An order with two pickups and two deliveries, on different days and with two drivers, became hard to follow.
The company wanted the week in an application: readable at a glance on a large screen in the office, with accounts that can see it without being able to change it.
What we built
The internal system came first. The industry calls it a TMS, a transport management system: staff, trucks and routes are kept in one place, not in separate files on everyone’s computer. Working on it taught us how the company runs from the inside: what gets tracked, who asks for what, and where time is lost. That is where we started from when we built the dispatch board later on.
The company website, on WordPress, in English: the services, the company history on a timeline, and the careers and contact pages. It has been online since 2020.
The dispatch board, a separate web application, with an admin panel in Angular.
The dispatcher enters an order once, with all its stops, and the application places it on the right days of the week. Orders can be filtered by date or range, driver, internal number, pickup location, delivery location, broker and the broker’s load number. Dates and times use the American format dispatch works with. Outbound loads sit apart from return loads.
Drivers and brokers are lists kept in the application: a name is typed once and then picked from the list, so the same person no longer turns up spelled three ways. The administrator adds users, and the other accounts can only view the week.
The main screen is made to stay open on a large TV in the office: whoever walks in first thing sees the week ahead.