Connecting shipment updates and dispatch workflows

This solution draws on the BCT team’s hands-on experience. Scope and delivery arrangements are tailored to each project.

Solution Overview

This solution brings shipment events and dispatch tasks into a shared operational view. A limited route or service area can be used to validate event quality and user workflows before broader rollout.

The Challenge

Questions to resolve before committing to scope:

Which system owns shipment and vehicle records?
How should offline, late or out-of-order updates be handled?
Who resolves delivery exceptions and corrects inaccurate events?

Delivery approach

Define events and responsibilities: Agree on shipment statuses, data sources and the owner of each operational action.
Pilot the operational view: Build event intake and a dispatcher view; review exception cases with the operations team.
Test resilience and expand: Test delayed updates and reconnect behaviour, then agree on support procedures and rollout boundaries.

Inside the solution

From workflow to system design

Event integration
Dispatch tooling
Exception handling

Reference architecture for Event integration, Dispatch tooling, Exception handling. Design rationale and deliverables follow below. — Reference architecture showing the solution’s components and data flows. The implementation is adapted to each project’s requirements.

Delivery model

Dedicated team, starting with one carrier integration

Client decisions and discovery

The operations owner prioritises exceptions and confirms shipment-state definitions. Dispatchers review the proposed interface; carrier contacts confirm event contracts.

BCT implementation responsibilities

The BA observes dispatch workflows. Engineers integrate carrier events and build the dispatch view. QA replays delayed, duplicated and out-of-order events against the agreed state model.

Review gates and scope boundaries

Review each increment with dispatchers and the product owner. Confirm who handles unresolved exceptions, how long event history is kept and which location data each role may access.

Key design decision

Preserve event time and receipt time separately. Deduplicate updates and flag late events before changing the visible shipment state. Dispatchers need the source and freshness of each update, plus an owner for unresolved exceptions.

Delivery artifacts

Agree these outputs during scoping, then review them alongside the acceptance checks below.

Carrier event contracts and a normalized shipment-event model
Dispatch view with freshness, source and exception states
Out-of-order replay tests and exception-response runbook

How to evaluate delivery

Reconcile displayed status with the shipment event history.
Test repeated, delayed and out-of-order events.
Measure dispatch effort and exception resolution against an agreed baseline.