A closed autobahn, and the yard never jams
Lukas runs the warehouses of a large air cargo forwarder around Frankfurt Airport.
Listen to the story:
The challenge
His five warehouses live on tight dock slots. When the autobahn closes near Kelsterbach or a road shuts by Cargo City South, forty trucks arrive late at once. The yard jams, slots are lost, and his team spends the evening rebooking by phone.
How the flow works
With xMap Flows, Lukas built Nova. Nova is an AI employee: a flow of 5 blocks.
Whenever a road closes near one of his five warehouses,
A road closed near a site (When something changes)
Nova picks out the full closures,
Full closures only (Filter)
says in plain words which warehouse it hits,
Which warehouse it hits (xMap LLM)
hands it to the flow his team built to rebook dock slots,
Rebook the dock slots (Run another flow)
and tells the yard team in Teams.
Tell the yard team (Microsoft Teams)
What it solves
- Closures jam the yard: solved by When something changes and Filter
- Lost dock slots: solved by Run another flow
- Evenings rebooking: solved by Run another flow and Microsoft Teams
The result
On Tuesday at seven, a crash closes the autobahn near Kelsterbach. Within fifteen minutes Nova has told the warehouse team and moved twenty six slots to the afternoon. The yard never jams, and the team goes home at six.
Lukas still gets closures. He just stopped getting the chaos that came with them.
An illustrative scenario: the figures are modelled to show what the flow produces, not a customer's results.
The flow, block by block
- 1
A road closed near a site
Starts the flow when something changes around your places, instead of on a timer: a new place of a kind opens nearby, a rating drops below a line, a place closes, or a road is closed near a site.
- 2
- 3
- 4
Rebook the dock slots
Runs one of your other flows with the items that reach this block, once with all of them or once for each (a loop), and can carry on with what that flow found.
- 5
Templates to build it
Ready-made flows with the same blocks. Open one, change the city and the kind of place, and run it.
- New industrial sites near a nature reserveA note the day a plant, quarry or dump opens near a protected area.
- New marine suppliers near the port, the day they openEach new marine supplier near the port, the day it opens.
- A new vet clinic opens near mineA note the day a new vet clinic opens near yours.
- Rivals near me whose rating dropsA note when a nearby rival’s rating falls below 4, with a way to win its customers.
- New hotels opening near mineA new hotel near yours the day it appears, with its likely impact.
- 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
- Location intelligenceUsing where things are, and what is around them, to make business decisions.
- Site selectionChoosing where to open a store, branch, clinic or facility.
- Lead scoringRanking prospects by how likely they are to buy.
- Build your first flow in ten minutesFrom a blank page to a flow that emails you a ranked list every morning.
- Enrich a list onceA CSV of addresses or companies back with phone, website, rating and an AI score.
- Run a flow when something changesA new place nearby, a rating that drops, a place that closes, a road closed near a site.
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- Five riders who never sit in a closed roadThabo runs a small motorbike courier company in Johannesburg, with five riders and a lot of parcels.
- The dock knows before the load gets warmZoe runs cold chain dispatch at a large chilled food distributor in Brisbane.
- Twenty new lockers, every one where people liveBen plans the parcel locker network for a large delivery company in Vancouver.
- Not one sofa caught in the afternoon stormGabriela runs a small furniture delivery business in Panama City, with two vans and a lot of sofas.
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.