Dispatch Software Development Services

The dispatch board your team works from all day (jobs, drivers and vehicles on one map and timeline), assignment and route optimisation, same-day re-dispatch when a job is added, cancelled or running late, a driver app for job details, navigation hand-off, status updates and proof of delivery, two-way driver messaging, customer ETA notifications and tracking links, and end-of-day closeout that feeds billing and payroll. We build a complete dispatch system or the pieces your current tools are missing.

A TMS is mostly about freight procurement and cost: building loads, tendering them to carriers, rating, tracking and auditing invoices. Dispatch software is about running your own drivers and vehicles in real time: who does which job, in what order, and what happens when the plan breaks at 10am. Carriers and delivery operators often need dispatch more than a TMS, and shippers or brokers usually need the opposite. If you need both, we connect them so loads flow from the TMS into dispatch without re-keying.

Use an off-the-shelf tool if your jobs are simple and similar every day; there are good, affordable products for that. Custom pays off when your assignment rules are what make you money or keep you compliant (mixed equipment, driver qualifications, multi-leg or drayage moves, tight service windows), when you sell delivery as a service and the customer experience is your product, or when dispatchers spend hours a day working around a tool that doesn't fit. A common route is to keep your existing telematics and order systems and replace only the dispatch layer.

Telematics and ELD platforms such as Samsara, Motive and Geotab for vehicle location, engine data and driver hours; route optimisation through the Google Maps Platform Route Optimization API, HERE Tour Planning or an in-house solver built on Google OR-Tools; maps and truck routing from Google Maps Platform, HERE or Mapbox; SMS and messaging through Twilio or similar for driver and customer notifications; and your order source, whether that is a TMS, an ecommerce or ERP system, EDI, or a customer booking portal, plus accounting and payroll for closeout. We confirm API access, rate limits and costs for each provider during discovery.

Both. The optimiser proposes a plan and suggests re-assignments when something changes, but the dispatcher approves, edits or locks any job or driver. We model your constraints explicitly (time windows, vehicle capacity, equipment, driver skills, shift start and end, breaks and remaining hours of service) so suggestions are ones your team would actually accept, and we log every manual override so the rules can improve over time.

The dispatch board reads remaining driving and on-duty time from the driver's ELD through the telematics API and warns before a job is assigned that would push a driver over their limits. The carrier's registered ELD stays the system of record for hours of service; dispatch software uses that data to plan, it does not replace it. Messages and assignment history are kept, which also helps a carrier show it did not pressure drivers to break safety rules.

You do. Source code, cloud accounts, optimisation settings, driver and job history and the integration credentials belong to you, and Northell Design documents the system so your own team or another vendor can run and extend it.