Logistics & Distribution · SaaS Platform
Northstar
A network-wide operations platform giving a national haulage group live visibility of every consignment, vehicle and depot.
Overview
- Industry
- Logistics & Distribution
- Category
- SaaS Platform
- Technology
- Next.jsTypeScriptPostgreSQLRedisAzure
Northstar is a logistics operations platform built for a distribution group running thousands of consignments a day across a partner network. It replaces a patchwork of spreadsheets, legacy portals and phone calls with a single, live view of the entire operation — from first scan to signed delivery.
The challenge
The group's data lived in six systems that didn't talk to each other. Depot managers were making capacity decisions on yesterday's numbers, and customer service teams had no reliable answer to the simplest question: where is my freight? Any replacement had to work for hub staff on rugged scanners as well as directors on boardroom screens.
01
Research
We spent two weeks embedded in depots and the central hub, shadowing night-shift supervisors and mapping every hand-off in the freight journey. That fieldwork produced a service blueprint that became the backbone of the product — and killed several features everyone assumed were essential.
02
Design
The interface is built around a single organising idea: one consignment, one timeline. Every screen — dispatch, hub scan, customer service, invoicing — is a different lens on the same timeline, so staff never re-learn the mental model. A restrained dark UI keeps night-shift screens comfortable and exceptions impossible to miss.
03
Development
An event-sourced core ingests scan data from 4,000 devices in near real-time, with a read-model layer that keeps dashboards under 100ms. We shipped in vertical slices every two weeks, running the old and new systems side by side until confidence was earned, not assumed.
Results
38%
fewer customer service calls
11 min
average exception resolution, down from 3 hours
99.98%
platform uptime in year one
Gallery
For the first time in twenty years, everyone in the business is looking at the same numbers. It has changed how we run the network.
Placeholder Name
Operations Director, Logistics Group
Let's build something exceptional.
Tell us about the problem you're trying to solve. We'll tell you honestly whether — and how — software can solve it.