The dock knows before the load gets warm

Zoe runs cold chain dispatch at a large chilled food distributor in Brisbane. 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. With xMap Flows, Zoe built Frost. Every ten minutes through the day, Frost reads where each truck is from her fleet table, measures how fast the traffic around it is moving, picks the trucks crawling below twenty kilometres an hour, works out how late each one will be, and warns the receiving dock in Slack, so the slot can move. 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.

The story in words