The dock knows before the load gets warm
Zoe runs cold chain dispatch at a large chilled food distributor in Brisbane.
Listen to the story:
The challenge
Her refrigerated trucks have tight windows at supermarket docks. When a truck crawls through traffic, nobody knows until it misses its slot. The dock turns it away, the driver idles for two hours to keep the load cold, and sometimes the load is lost.
How the flow works
With xMap Flows, Zoe built Frost. Frost is an AI employee: a flow of 6 blocks.
Every ten minutes through the day,
Every ten minutes (Schedule)
Frost reads where each truck is from her fleet table,
Trucks on the road (My data)
measures how fast the traffic around it is moving,
Speed around each truck (Traffic Flow)
picks the trucks crawling below twenty kilometres an hour,
Crawling below 20 km/h (Filter)
works out how late each one will be,
Minutes behind (Calculated field)
and warns the receiving dock in Slack, so the slot can move.
Warn the receiving dock (Slack)
What it solves
- Missed dock windows: solved by Calculated field and Slack
- Idling to stay cold: solved by Slack
- Bad news comes too late: solved by Traffic Flow and Filter
The result
On Thursday a crash slows the Gateway Motorway. Frost sees two trucks crawling at twelve kilometres an hour, works out they will be forty minutes late, and both docks move their slots in time. Nobody idles, and every pallet of seafood lands cold.
Zoe's trucks still hit traffic. Now the dock knows before the ice cream does.
An illustrative scenario: the figures are modelled to show what the flow produces, not a customer's results.
The flow, block by block
- 1
- 2
Trucks on the road
Brings in a table you uploaded or a list you saved on the My data page: your stores, customers, target accounts or sites.
- 3
Speed around each truck
How the traffic is moving on the roads around each place, right now: the current speed and the free-flow speed in km/h, how jammed the roads are (a jam factor from 0, free, to 10, standstill), the congestion as a percentage, the level in words, how many roads were measured and closed, and the busiest road.
- 4
- 5
- 6
Templates to build it
Ready-made flows with the same blocks. Open one, change the city and the kind of place, and run it.
- Wind alert for crane liftsA Slack alert to stop crane lifts when strong wind is forecast.
- Weather-driven promotions per storeA promotion idea for each store when heat or rain is coming.
- Rain warning for my delivery hubsWhen rain is coming at a hub, a customer notice is ready for the ops team.
- Road speeds outside my depots, every hourHow the roads outside each depot are moving, every hour, the most jammed first.
- Stores competing with each otherYour stores that sit within 1 km of each other, with the people around them.
- High UV days: advice for my clinics' patientsOn high UV days, a short sun safety tip for each clinic's patients.
Industries
Learn how it works
- Data enrichmentAdding details to records you already have.
- How to score candidate store sitesCompare sites on residents, competitors and neighbours, with an AI score and a reason.
- How to skip your existing customersOnly prospects reach your team, never someone you already serve.
- Your own tables and lists (My data)Upload a CSV, save lists of results, and use them in flows.
- Act from Slack, WhatsApp or TelegramApprove runs and change a flow without opening the app.
- Compare sites side by sideTwo or three spots measured the same way, one column each, the best of every row marked and the best site and why.
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- Six drivers, fair shares, no door twiceYi-ting runs a small family delivery company in Taipei, with six drivers and orders from three online shops.
Build this flow on your own city
Run a live search on the home page without an account, or let Ask xMap build the flow from one sentence.