The problem
Megaspeed Cargo runs over 600 containers in transit at any given moment across five major carriers. Tracking ran on a brittle process: ops staff opened five carrier portals, copy-pasted statuses into a master spreadsheet, then chased exceptions by email.
Daily reconciliation took two FTEs four hours each. Customer-facing exceptions surfaced late. The CRM ran a parallel, half-correct version of reality.
What we built
A multi-tenant SaaS dashboard with carrier-agnostic ingestion. Each carrier hooks in through a typed adapter; new carriers ship in under a week. Statuses unify into a single state machine with explicit exception classes.
- Carrier-agnostic ingestion via a normalized event schema and per-carrier adapters.
- Exception alerting with severity routing - anomalies hit the right inbox in under 60 seconds.
- CRM hand-off API so account managers see the same state as ops, in real time.
- Audit-ready logs per container, per status change, per actor.
How we shipped it
Discovery sprint week one: a written scope, fixed budget, and risk map. Architecture week two - schema, ingestion contracts, and exception taxonomy nailed before any code. Build phase ran in two-week sprints with Friday demos. Production traffic started in week six behind feature flags. Full cut-over week thirteen.
What we measured
- Manual reconciliation hours per ops FTE per week
- Time-to-detect on carrier exceptions
- SLA attainment on customer-facing ETAs
- Onboarding time per additional carrier
The result, twelve months later
Megaspeed's reconciliation hours dropped 82%. On-time exception response improved 34 percentage points. The system paid for itself in the first quarter and has tracked roughly 9.4× ROI through the first twelve months - measured on real cost savings and customer revenue retained, signed off jointly with their CFO.
Operator's note
"They asked the questions our last vendor was too proud to ask. We shipped in fourteen weeks what had been stuck for a year." - Priya N., VP Operations, Megaspeed Cargo