Fleet Tracking Case Study — Northbeam Logistics
A real-time fleet management dashboard replacing three legacy spreadsheet tools.
Industry
Logistics & Supply Chain
Timeline
9 weeks
Team
2 engineers, 1 designer
Category
Web Platform
Where things stood
Northbeam's dispatchers were tracking a 40-truck fleet across three separate spreadsheets and a whiteboard, re-entering the same load data by hand and catching schedule conflicts only after a truck was already en route.
How we got there
Consolidated data model
Mapped all three spreadsheets and the dispatch whiteboard into a single Postgres schema before writing any UI, so dispatchers weren't just staring at a prettier version of the same mess.
Real-time dashboard
Built a Next.js dashboard with live load status, driver location, and conflict warnings that update over websockets instead of a page refresh.
Staged rollout
Ran the new dashboard alongside the old spreadsheets for two weeks so dispatchers could cross-check before cutting over fully.
What changed
3
Legacy tools replaced by one dashboard
~6 hrs/week
Dispatcher time saved on manual data entry
0
Double-booked loads since cutover
Tech stack
Next.js
Server-rendered dashboard pages that load fast even with live fleet data streaming in.
TypeScript
Caught schema mismatches between the three merged data sources before they became runtime bugs.
PostgreSQL
One relational store for load, driver, and route data instead of three spreadsheets that never agreed.
WebSockets
Pushes load status and driver location updates to dispatchers instantly instead of requiring a page refresh.
Tailwind CSS
Kept the dashboard's dense data views consistent as more screens got added.
Vercel
Zero-downtime deploys during the two-week parallel-run period, without provisioning new infrastructure.
“Avenva rebuilt our platform in a fraction of the time we quoted internally, and the code quality made our own engineers' lives easier for years after.”
Sarah Chen
VP of Engineering, Northbeam Logistics
