The challenge
A mid-size freight operator managed shipments across nineteen carriers, each with its own portal, file format or EDI variant. Operations staff kept a dozen browser tabs open and reconciled by hand. Problems were typically discovered when a customer called, by which point the options for recovery had largely closed.
Late delivery penalties had grown into a material line item, and the operations director could not answer basic questions about which lanes or carriers were driving them because the data existed only inside each carrier's system.
What we did
- 01
Normalised nineteen feeds into one event model
EDI, carrier APIs, telematics and manual updates were translated at the boundary into a single internal shipment event model, so downstream logic never had to know which carrier a message came from.
- 02
Built for messy, late, malformed input
Every integration has a dead-letter queue, replay capability and an operator-visible failure log. Nothing is dropped silently, which was the failure mode of the previous partial integrations.
- 03
Predictive ETAs rather than reported ones
A model trained on two years of historical movements predicts arrival from current position, historical lane performance and time of day — surfacing likely breaches hours before the carrier reports a delay.
- 04
Exceptions routed to a person with context
Deviations are assigned to a named operator with the shipment history, the customer commitment and the available recovery options in one view, rather than as an alert requiring investigation.
- 05
Lane and carrier analytics
A warehouse layer built from the same event stream gave the operations director per-lane and per-carrier performance for the first time, which changed carrier negotiations at the next contract round.
The outcome
Exceptions are now detected on average 4.5 hours earlier than under the previous process, which is usually the difference between rerouting and paying a penalty. Late-delivery penalties fell 61% over the two quarters following rollout.
Operations staff monitor one system instead of nineteen. The analytics layer also surfaced that two carriers accounted for a disproportionate share of penalties on specific lanes — a finding that fed directly into the following year's contract negotiations.