Logistics Control Center

A facility services company dispatching 60+ field teams daily across metropolitan Sydney had no centralized system for job scheduling, route planning, or real-time field coordination. Operations ran on whiteboards, phone calls, and a dispatcher who held the entire schedule in her head.

Job scheduling lived on a physical whiteboard in the office. Field teams received their daily schedule via a group text message at 6am. Any changes after that required individual phone calls to each affected team

No route optimization. Teams were assigned jobs geographically by gut feel. A technician might drive 45 minutes across the city for a 30-minute job, then drive 40 minutes back for the next one

Real-time job status was invisible. The office had no idea whether a team was on-site, running late, or finished early until someone called in. Customers asking "when will they arrive?" got "we'll check and call you back"

Resource allocation was reactive. When a team called in sick, the dispatcher spent 45+ minutes reshuffling the day's schedule manually, calling each affected team and customer individually

Service completion documentation was paper-based. Teams filled out job sheets on-site, drove them back to the office, and admin staff manually entered data into spreadsheets. Average delay from job completion to system entry: 3 business days

Monthly operational reporting required the operations manager to compile data from whiteboards, text messages, paper job sheets, and the dispatcher's memory. The report took 2 full days to assemble

The company was adding 3-4 new field teams per quarter, and every new team made the coordination problem exponentially harder.

I built a centralized operations platform that handles job scheduling, route optimization, real-time field tracking, and automated reporting. Designed so the dispatcher manages 60+ teams from a single screen instead of a whiteboard and a phone.

60+ teams. 200+ daily jobs. One screen.

✅ Drag-and-drop scheduling board with team availability, skill matching, and geographic proximity factored into assignment suggestions

✅ Conflict detection preventing double-booking of teams, flagging overlapping time windows, and accounting for travel time between jobs

✅ Bulk rescheduling: when a team calls in sick, one click redistributes their jobs across available teams weighted by proximity and capacity

📊 Outcome: Daily schedule creation dropped from 90 minutes to 15 minutes. Sick-day reshuffling from 45+ minutes of phone calls to 1 click and 2 minutes of review

Less driving. More working.

✅ Automatic route sequencing minimizing total travel time per team per day using real-time traffic data and job duration estimates

✅ Dynamic re-routing when jobs are added, cancelled, or rescheduled mid-day with updated ETAs pushed to affected teams automatically

✅ Travel time analytics showing actual vs. estimated drive times per route, identifying chronic underestimates

📊 Outcome: Average daily drive time per team reduced 32%. Teams completing 1.4 additional jobs per day on average from recovered travel time. Fuel costs down 24%

Know where every team is and what they're doing. Right now.

✅ Mobile app with GPS check-in/check-out at each job site, automatic time logging, and status updates (en route, on-site, completed)

✅ Live dispatch map showing all team locations, current job status, and next assignment with ETA

✅ Customer-facing ETA notifications: "Your technician is 15 minutes away" sent automatically based on GPS and traffic data

📊 Outcome: "When will they arrive?" calls to the office dropped 78%. Customer satisfaction scores improved from 3.4 to 4.5 out of 5. Real-time visibility into 100% of field operations

Paper job sheets eliminated. Data captured on-site, available instantly.

✅ Mobile job completion forms with photo capture, customer signature, notes, and checklist verification submitted from the field

✅ Automatic sync to the operations dashboard within seconds of submission. No manual data entry, no 3-day delays

✅ Job history searchable by customer, location, team, date, or service type for warranty claims and service history lookups

📊 Outcome: Job completion to system entry dropped from 3 business days to real-time. Admin data entry eliminated (15+ hours/week recovered). Complete digital audit trail for every job

Real-time dashboards replacing the 2-day monthly compilation.

✅ Live KPI dashboards: jobs completed, on-time rate, average job duration, team utilization, customer satisfaction, and revenue per team

✅ Automated daily and weekly reports delivered to operations managers via email with trend analysis and exception flags

✅ Historical comparison views showing performance trends by team, region, service type, and time period

📊 Outcome: Monthly operations report assembly eliminated (2 full days recovered). Operations manager reviewing live dashboards daily instead of waiting for month-end compilation

Why I chose this stack and what tradeoffs I made.

PostgreSQL with PostGIS for geospatial queries — Route optimization and proximity-based job assignment require spatial queries (nearest team, travel distance calculations). PostGIS handles these natively without a separate geospatial service. Tradeoff: slightly more complex schema, but eliminated an external dependency

Redis pub/sub for real-time dispatch updates — 60+ field teams sending GPS pings every 30 seconds. Redis pub/sub pushes location updates to the dispatch map in real time without polling. WebSocket connections from the dispatch dashboard subscribe to team-specific channels

SQS for job documentation processing — Photo uploads from field teams are bursty (most arrive between 3-5pm as jobs complete). SQS buffers uploads and feeds them to image processing workers at a steady rate. Zero dropped submissions even during peak hours

AWS S3 with CloudFront for job photos — Field documentation generates 500+ photos per day. S3 for storage, CloudFront for fast retrieval when operations staff review completed jobs. Lifecycle policies archive photos older than 12 months to Glacier for cost optimization