Case study / Trucking
How a dispatch day looks when you read 6,558 emails
DG Express is a trucking company in the Greater Toronto Area. Its dispatch runs on a shared inbox and an Excel schedule, the way a lot of small carriers do. It works. It also means the same load gets typed or filed three or four times before the customer hears it is delivered.
The problem you can't see from inside
Nobody at a small carrier can say how many times a day they retype the same information. So before building anything, Gestech read it off the record. Sixty days of dispatch and owner email (6,558 messages) and 1,110 saved versions of the schedule workbook, lined up by timestamp.
What the record showed
- About 85 emails reach dispatch every weekday, and about 16 of them need a quote back.
- 61% of loads on the schedule trace to an email first. The median wait from email to schedule is 24 hours, and a quarter go on within the hour.
- Nearly half of all driver changes are made on the day of the load. The board is reshuffled all day, not set once.
- About 12 status emails go out every weekday (picked up, ETA, delivered), and about 19 proof-of-delivery files are saved by name every morning.
- Almost half the rows on the schedule have no load number. They are known only by their place on the sheet, which is the kind of thing that breaks the first time anyone inserts a row.
That last one was a surprise. No amount of asking would have found it.
What got built
DG Control, a dispatch system built around that day, not around a template:
- The inbox sorts incoming mail, drafts the load, and files rate confirmations and proofs of delivery onto the right load.
- A quote workspace sends the reply from the dispatch address in one click.
- A load board and schedule board with drag-and-drop driver assignment and a conflict check, so the same-day reshuffle has somewhere to happen.
- Pickup and delivery updates go to the customer from the dispatch address in one click.
- A digital proof of delivery for drivers.
Still being built: a two-way link to the Excel schedule that matches rows by content instead of position, accounts for drivers so assignments reach them, and the carrier confirmation made straight from a load.
What changes
The day stays the same. The retyping goes. A load that arrives by email is drafted for the dispatcher instead of typed. Rate confirmations and proofs of delivery land on the right load by themselves. A quote and a "delivered" notice go out from the dispatch address in one click. Between quotes, status emails and proof-of-delivery filing, that is roughly 45 small repeat jobs a weekday that no longer need typing or hunting for.
A single load used to live in the inbox, the schedule sheet and four separate folders. Now it lives in one place, so nobody hunts across them to find it. That alone saves time, before any of the automation counts.
What that frees up is attention. The people who run a carrier are the same people who answer its email, and every minute not spent retyping is a minute on the work that brings in the next load.
What this means if you run a carrier
Most small carriers are one inbox and one spreadsheet away from this. The way to find out is to read your own week, which takes a few hours, not to buy a product built for someone else's.
Next step
Bring one task your dispatchers are sick of doing by hand. In 30 minutes you will know whether it can run itself.