A nationwide transport management system, built in under six months

Problem

One of Saudi Arabia’s largest grocery retailers was moving goods from its distribution centers to stores across the Kingdom with paperwork, spreadsheets and phone calls. Orders arrived from the warehouse system, but everything after that was manual: planning happened in Excel around driver schedules, there was no route planning or dispatching, no way to see how well trucks were used, no live tracking, and proof of delivery was on paper.

Constraints

• Nationwide from day one: four regional distribution centers, plus temporary satellite DCs during Ramadan.
• A mixed fleet: company trucks, rental trucks, and casual drivers without a handheld device or the driver app.
• Lots of systems to talk to: the warehouse system, a smart key-management system, vehicle telematics and a routing engine.
• Under six months from kickoff to go-live, on a high-stakes project, with me as both project lead and engineer.

What I built

I gathered the requirements, planned the project and built every part of the system except the driver app and telematics integration, which the other engineer owned. We helped each other constantly. All of it was written by hand, without AI coding tools.

• Automatic order splitting: bulk orders are spread across the full week by weight, within each DC’s capacity.
• Planning, dispatch and vehicle assignment, with routes from an integrated routing engine.
• A yard module for the parking attendants who manage trucks at the loading bays.
• A cross-dock module for goods moving DC → DC → store.
• A satellite DC module for the Ramadan peak.
• Support for rental trucks and casual drivers with no device.
• Integrations with the warehouse system, the smart key system (drivers scan their card to collect a truck’s key) and telematics (speeding and other live vehicle data).
• Reporting, and digital proof of delivery at the store.

Result

Almost everything in transport is now automated, which saved fleet coordinators a huge amount of working time, and trucks are used far more efficiently than before. For the first time there’s visibility at every step, from docking a truck at the bay to proof of delivery at the store. The system is still running in production today.