From spreadsheets to SaaS platform — how a logistics company transformed its operations in 14 weeks

In the autumn of 2024, the operations director of a mid-sized Amsterdam logistics company called with a question we hear often: "Our planner sent out the wrong version of the schedule last night. Three drivers turned up at the wrong address. How do we stop this?"

The company — active in last-mile delivery for retail clients — had operated for eight years using a combination of Excel, WhatsApp groups, and a shared Google Drive. In the early years it worked. With twelve drivers and two planners, everything was still manageable. But the company had grown. By the time we spoke to them, they had 28 drivers, five client accounts, and planners working late into the evening to manually coordinate everything.

The problem could no longer be ignored.

Why Excel always eventually fails with growth

Excel is an excellent tool for analyses, models, and working out ideas. It is a poor tool for operational processes with multiple simultaneous users, real-time data, and dependencies between teams.

At this company we saw three structural problems.

Version conflicts. The daily schedule was created in the morning by a planner, distributed via WhatsApp, and then updated when something changed. But those updates did not always reach everyone. Drivers were operating on a version of the schedule that was already two updates old. The incident with the three drivers at the wrong address was not an exception — it was a weekly risk.

No real-time visibility. Clients regularly called to ask where their shipment was. The answer was always the same: wait a moment, I'll call the driver. There was no dashboard, no tracking, no automatic status updates. This cost hours of manual communication every day.

Errors increase with scale. A planner managing twelve routes can track that cognitively. With 28 routes with variable time windows, client-specific instructions, and daily changes, that is humanly unsustainable without errors. Double bookings, forgotten stops, incorrect loading sequences — every error cost money and customer trust.

The brief: build what actually works in practice

After a two-week discovery phase — conversations with planners, drivers, and customer service staff — it became clear what was needed. Not a digital version of their Excel, but a system built around how the operation actually functioned.

We defined three core systems:

A route planning module for planners. Draggable, real-time, with automatic conflict detection. If a driver already has two stops too many, or if two assignments overlap in time window, the planner sees this immediately. The schedule is not "sent out" — drivers see updates live as soon as they are saved.

A driver app. Simple, fast, offline-capable. Drivers see their daily schedule, can mark stops as delivered, and communicate deviations directly through the app. No more WhatsApp for operational communication.

A client portal. Clients log in and see the real-time status of their shipments. No more calls to customer service for status information.

Fourteen weeks to a working MVP

The MVP trajectory ran from week one through week fourteen. That is fast for an operational system — it required sharp choices about what would and would not be in the first version.

What was deferred: automatic route optimisation (the planner still does this manually), billing integration, and a comprehensive reporting module. These were real wishes, but not blockers for the core operation.

What went live on day one: the planning module, the driver app, real-time statuses, and the client portal. The first week after go-live, planners and drivers ran both systems in parallel — the old system as a safety net, the new system as primary. After five working days, the old system was redundant.

The first month was not perfect. The app had a bug on older Android versions that we only discovered after two days. The UI of the planning module turned out to be less intuitive than expected for one of the planners — we adjusted the navigation after feedback. This is part of an honest software project: the first version is a beginning, not an end point.

Six months later: what the numbers say

After the full rollout — including the features that were deferred at the MVP stage — the results are measurable.

40% reduction in planning time. What used to take two planners an entire morning is now done by one planner in two hours. This is the direct result of automatic conflict detection and the elimination of manual communication rounds.

Zero double bookings in six months. This had previously been a weekly incident.

From 8 to 40 employees without additional operational staff. The company has quadrupled its client base. The operation runs on the same platform, with the same two planners, without the error rate increasing. This is the real value of scalable software: growing without needing proportionally more people for coordination.

Customer satisfaction noticeably improved. Without citing hard NPS data: the number of incoming status-information calls has dropped to nearly zero. Clients check the portal themselves.

What these kinds of projects teach

Companies often wait too long. The logic is understandable — as long as it works, you prefer to invest elsewhere. But with operational systems, the threshold for "it doesn't work anymore" is high, and when you cross it, you pay in errors, client churn, and staff burnout.

The best indicator that it is time to invest: when your growth is limited by the capacity of your tool, not by demand or strategy. This company had known for a year that Excel was a problem. The incident with the three drivers was the reason to call, but not the reason to build.

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