Harbor Logistics — Shipment Operations Dashboard

The challenge

Harbor Logistics manages freight movement across Southern California ports and rail yards. Their dispatch team was juggling five different systems — a legacy ERP, three carrier portals, and a sprawling Google Sheets setup that had grown over a decade.

Dispatchers spent the first two hours of every shift manually aggregating status data before they could answer a single customer call. Errors were routine. Senior staff carried the institutional knowledge needed to make the system work.

What we built

We designed and built a single internal operations dashboard that pulls live data from all three carrier APIs and the existing ERP, normalising it into one unified view.

Key features shipped:

• Real-time shipment board with status, ETA, and exception flags
• Automated exception alerting when shipments fall behind SLA
• Bulk dispatch actions replacing five separate data-entry workflows
• Role-based views for dispatchers, supervisors, and executive reporting
• CSV and PDF export replacing the manual morning reporting ritual

The system runs on Next.js with a lightweight Node backend, deployed on Railway with a managed Postgres instance.

How we worked

The project ran in four two-week sprints. The dispatch team had a staging environment from the end of sprint one — we held weekly demos and adjusted priorities in real-time rather than discovering surprises at the end.

We did a full production cut-over on a Sunday morning with two Harbor supervisors on a call. Zero data loss, zero downtime.

Results

"For the first time in years I walked in on a Monday and knew exactly what was happening without opening a single spreadsheet." — Operations Manager

Within 30 days of launch, Harbor measured a 40% reduction in average dispatch time per shipment. Six manual reporting workflows were fully retired. The team onboarded two new dispatchers in a week — previously that process took a month of shadowing.