36-hour dispatch cycle, down to under 4

The Challenge

The dispatch team was matching carriers to shipments by hand, 80+ times a day. Each one took about 38 minutes between route planning, availability checks, and confirmations. That added up to 30 hours a week of coordination work, leaving no room for the expansion planning leadership actually needed. The team knew what to build, but a four-month recruiting cycle for AI engineers wasn't going to work with peak season already on the calendar.

What We Built

Two engineers joined the client's daily standups within five days and started building inside their existing codebase. The system has three stages: one pulls in live shipment requests and carrier availability, the next scores routes on cost, transit time, and load fit, and the last assigns carriers and pushes confirmations automatically. When a delay or cancellation hits, the system recalculates in seconds. What used to take a day and a half now finishes in under four hours.

Results

Those 80+ daily assignments run on their own now. Dispatch cycle time dropped from roughly 36 hours to under 4, and the 30 weekly hours dispatchers spent on coordination went back into carrier relationships and expansion planning. Two engineers for 10 weeks cost a fraction of what a stalled launch or six-month hiring cycle would have, particularly with peak season volume at stake.