The starting point
A non-ferrous broker running pickups across three countries with a 14-truck fleet. Dispatch was a colour-coded spreadsheet plus a WhatsApp group with the drivers. The dispatcher knew where each truck was supposed to be — not where it actually was. Returning drivers waited around at depots because nobody knew they were 12 minutes out. New pickup requests landed in email and were typed by hand into a job sheet.
On paper they had capacity. On the street they were leaving an entire afternoon route on the floor every day.
What changed
Dispatch and the driver app went in together. Every driver got the mobile app with their day plan, turn-by-turn navigation, and offline proof-of-delivery capture. Pickup requests started coming in from the supplier portal (or being created by the dispatcher) and went straight to the nearest available driver. Tracking gave the dispatcher live positions; ETAs were no longer guesses.
The first two weeks were spent unwinding small bad habits — calls to drivers for status updates that the dispatcher could now just see on the map, end-of-day status that was already in the system.
What it bought them
After ninety days the same fourteen trucks were moving 38% more tonnage. The simple, boring driver of that number was an extra 1.4 trips per truck per day, freed up by tighter routing, fewer empty legs, and drivers stopping at the right pickups in the right order. Empty-leg mileage dropped about 21%.
The second-order effect: suppliers started preferring this broker because pickups now showed up within their requested window without phone calls. Repeat pickup volume grew almost on its own.
The dispatcher reports being less tired at end of shift. That metric does not show up in any report.
“We did not buy a new truck. We just stopped running the fleet we already had on a spreadsheet.”