International Logistics
A world of shipments on one screen
How an international logistics group replaced eleven separate tools with one command view, and now spots exceptions in minutes instead of hours.
- Industry
- International Logistics
- Service
- Operations dashboard
- Scope
- Three control rooms across three time zones
The challenge
Eleven screens, eleven logins and one question nobody could answer quickly: what is late?
The group moves freight by sea, air and road for manufacturers and retailers on four continents. Its control rooms watched shipments through eleven different tools, each showing a slice of the picture. A delayed vessel could take hours to connect to the customers it affected.
Operations leaders wanted one view of everything in motion, with problems surfaced before customers called. The control rooms run day and night, so the design had to work at four in the morning as well as at noon.
- Eleven tracking tools with no shared view
- Exceptions found by customers before the team
- Round-the-clock shifts across three time zones
Our approach
Show the whole world first, then only what needs attention.
Learning the night shift
We shadowed operators in all three control rooms, across day and night shifts. We noted every time someone switched screens, wrote something down or picked up the phone. Those moments became the list of things the new view had to answer.
A calm map with loud exceptions
The main view is a dark world map where routes glow softly when all is well. When a shipment slips, its route brightens and moves to the top of a short exceptions list, together with the customers affected and a suggested next step. Everything else stays quiet.
Built for long hours
We tuned contrast, type size and colour for wall screens viewed from across a room and laptops used up close. Live status tiles summarise each region, and an activity feed records every action taken, so the morning shift knows what the night shift did.
The outcome
From hours to minutes, and from reacting to getting ahead.
Median time to spot a delayed shipment fell from more than three hours to under ten minutes. Customers now hear about delays from the group before they notice them. Operators retired eight of the eleven old tools within six months, and new starters are trained in days rather than weeks.
We used to find out about problems from angry customers. Now we call them first.
The same design language now runs through the group’s customer portal, so clients see their shipments the way the control room does.