Eleven WhatsApp groups, one platform

Deliveries coordinated across eleven group chats and a magnetic wall map. We replaced the lot with one screen the owner could open from his phone.

Client: A regional food wholesaler
Sector: Wholesale and distribution
Duration: 14 weeks
Year: 2024

A delivery driver at the open back of a van in the yard behind a stone-built restaurant, holding a phone that shows the next drop.

Systems in use

Before: 11 chats, 4 sheets
Now: 1 platform

Vehicle tracking

Before: Magnets on a wall map
Now: Live GPS

Cost per delivery

Before: Not calculable
Now: Per route, daily

Monthly reconciliation

Before: ~2 days
Now: Continuous

The problem

The company supplied restaurants and butchers across three counties, running a fleet of vans out of one depot.

Coordination happened in eleven WhatsApp groups, one per route. Vehicle positions were tracked on a physical wall map with magnets, updated by whoever answered the phone. Expenses, deliveries and sales lived in four separate spreadsheets that were reconciled monthly, usually late.

The owner described the problem precisely: he could find out anything he wanted, but only by ringing someone.

A laminated road map on a transport office wall dotted with coloured magnets, above a desk with a phone off the hook, two mobile phones and piles of delivery notes.

What we found

The group chats were doing more work than anyone realised. Drivers were using them to flag problems, agree substitutions with customers, and hand jobs between each other, none of which existed anywhere else afterwards.

Replacing them with something that only tracked vehicles would have made the operation worse. The messaging had to go somewhere.

The project manager in a hi-vis vest in the depot yard, going through a page of notes with a driver while vans are loaded behind them.

The passenger seat of a delivery van with a clipboard of marked-up delivery notes, a phone lying face down, a temperature probe, keys and a crate of chilled goods in the footwell.

Laptop screen of the transport desk on a Thursday morning: eleven routes listed with each driver and how many drops are done, a live map showing where every van is, and route 4 to York marked 24 minutes behind, with its running order and a prompt to move a collection to another route. — Every van on one screen, placed by the trackers already fitted to them, beside the state of every drop. This is what replaced the magnets on the wall map.

How we got there

Fourteen weeks, and the vans were the easy part. Eleven chats and one man's memory were doing jobs nobody had written down, and each of those jobs needed somewhere to go before anything could be switched off.

Reading the chats before replacing them

With the drivers' agreement we went back through all eleven groups and sorted the messages by what they were for. Nearly everything was one of four things: a substitution, a customer who was shut, a job passed to another driver, or a note about a customer. Each of the four got its own place on the drop, and nothing the business depends on is left in a chat.

What only the owner knew

A lot of what kept the routes working was in his head: which kitchen wants its delivery before the chef arrives, which gate to use, who will take a call at five in the morning. He sat with us for two afternoons and we wrote it down customer by customer. It now shows on the drop, where a new driver sees it without ringing him.

The engineer at the studio wall, joining a row of chat cards with red tape to a sketch of one phone screen and explaining it to a colleague.

It had to be quicker than a message

Drivers will not use anything slower than WhatsApp. In the first version, recording a substitution meant typing it out, so for a week drivers did that and messaged the desk as well. The version in use takes a photograph and two taps, and typing is there only for the driver who wants it.

Tried in a cab, in gloves

Before any driver saw the screens we tried them in a van in the yard, wearing work gloves, with the phone in its mount. The buttons grew twice. Some of the routes lose signal for miles, so whatever a driver records is kept on the phone and sent when the signal returns, and the screen says so.

The project manager and the engineer at a table in the depot canteen with a driver, who is trying the driver screen on a phone and pointing something out.

What we built

One live view of the fleet, from the telematics units

Vehicle positions pulled from the telematics units already fitted to the vans, alongside delivery status per drop. The wall map came down.

Expenses attached to journeys

Fuel and running costs recorded against the vehicle and the route, which produced a cost per delivery for the first time.

Tablet screen of one day's cost per drop: the figure across all eleven routes, the miles from the trackers, fuel and running costs, every route ranked by what a drop cost, and one route's journey broken down with its fuel and parking receipts.

Phone screen from the driver app at one drop: the customer's name, address and contact, the lines on the order, and a substitution recorded against the drop, rump steak swapped for sirloin at the same price per kilo and agreed with the customer at the door, with a photo attached.

Structured handovers

Substitutions, failed deliveries and customer notes captured against the drop rather than in a chat thread, so the record survived the shift.

Phone screen from the driver app on the way to the next drop: a dark navy map with the route in orange, the customer's name and address in large type, the arrival time and distance, a note from the customer, a notice that one photo will send when there is signal, and a large orange button to mark arrival.

Built for a phone in a cab

The driver-facing screens are large-target, high-contrast, and work on a poor connection, because that is the environment they are used in.

Afterwards

The measure the owner cared about was not in the brief. He wanted to stop being the person who knew where everything was, because it meant he could not take a day off.

Six months in, the transport desk runs without him.