A delivery finished on the road but still open in the office
Proof of delivery and exception handling across 35 to 55 consignments a day, where the office view lags the road by hours.
A regional same day and next day freight operator turning over under three million pounds, moving 35 to 55 consignments daily.
A delivered Orchyn engagement. The client is anonymised at their request. The company and the people are not named. The operation, the workflow, the controls and the outcome are as delivered.
The commercial problem
Proof of delivery, driver messages, customer emails and carrier updates live in different places. An exception can be resolved on the road and stay open in the office, delaying the customer update and the invoice.
The team is capable and trapped in chasing. A completed job that cannot be evidenced is neither visibly complete nor ready to bill.
How the work runs before
- A booking arrives by email or phone and is rekeyed into a transport sheet.
- The transport manager assigns a driver and a route.
- The driver sends proof of delivery or an exception by message.
- Coordination staff search messages, email and shared folders to find it.
- Finance holds the invoice until proof of delivery can be located.
- Urgent issues are handled by phone, then updated manually across several systems.
What makes it hard to automate safely
- A delayed, failed or damaged delivery needs human operational judgement. The system cannot promise a redelivery or accept a claim.
- Proof of delivery arrives as photographs, scans and messages with inconsistent reference numbers.
- Invoice release must rest on confirmed evidence, never on model confidence.
- The service desk needs reliable status without exposing all driver communications.
What we change first
Reference conventions were standardised across booking, driver message and proof of delivery. A job could then be identified consistently from any of the three. Without that, evidence matching is guesswork regardless of how good the extraction is.
The redesigned workflow
- A booking, driver update or proof of delivery arrives into a secure intake queue.
- The model extracts job reference, status and evidence type, linking the original file.
- The workflow matches evidence to the open job and proposes a status change with a confidence level.
- A coordinator confirms status. An exception routes to the transport manager with the evidence attached.
- Finance releases the invoice against confirmed evidence, not against a proposed match.
Where the model stops
The model reads evidence and proposes a match. It does not close a job, release an invoice or contact a customer. A low confidence match is shown as unresolved rather than assumed.
What we learned
The office was always behind the road. Closing that gap was worth more than any individual efficiency, because it was upstream of customer updates, invoice release and cash. Fixing reference conventions did more work than the model did.