Warning dispatchers before a truck runs late
A trucking dashboard feature that watches every load on the road, works out whether it'll hit its delivery deadline, and pings the office the moment one starts running late — so a problem becomes a phone call you make, not one you receive.
In trucking, a late delivery costs money and trust. The hard part: nobody knows a load is going to be late until it already is — too late to do anything about it.
I built a feature that changes that. It watches every truck carrying a load, works out whether it'll make its deadline, and warns the dispatch office before the delivery goes wrong.
The problem, in plain terms
Every load has a promise attached: deliver to this place, by this time. Once the truck is rolling, that promise is heading toward kept or broken — but the office usually finds out which only when the customer calls to complain. I wanted the system to answer one question, continuously, for every load on the road: "Is this one going to be on time?"
How it works (no jargon)
Every few minutes, the system does a quiet check-up on each active load:
- Where's the truck now? It reads the live location.
- Where's it going, and by when? From the load's paperwork.
- Will it make it? It maps a realistic truck route between the two and estimates the arrival time.
- On time or not? Comfortably ahead → on time. Cutting it close → at risk. Going to miss it → late.
The dispatcher sees this on one screen: counters for On time / At risk / Late, and a list with the most urgent loads first. Click one for a live map, its route, and how much slack it has.
The part that saves the day
Nobody stares at a screen all day, so the real value is this: the moment a load slips into "at risk" or "late," an alert pops up on the dispatcher's computer — even if they're in another tab. That one message turns a disaster into a decision: call the driver, warn the customer, or reroute — while there's still time.
The details that make it feel right
A feature like this dies if it's annoying, so I sweated the small things:
- It doesn't spam. One alert when a load first becomes a problem — not a reminder every few minutes.
- It's honest. If an address can't be pinned down or a deadline is missing, it stays silent rather than crying wolf.
- It knows when to stop. Delivered or long abandoned loads drop off the list.
- Each office sets its own "cutting it close" — 30 minutes, two hours, their call.
Why I'm proud of it
The clever part wasn't any one piece — it was reusing what we already had. Instead of building a new machine, I extended the existing engine that already tracked trucks and talked to mapping services, and taught it this new job: checking every load on a steady rhythm, remembering what it had seen, and only speaking up when something genuinely changed.
The result mostly stays invisible — then, at exactly the right moment, says the one thing the office needs to hear: "This one's about to be late."