What wasn't working.
The distributor operated 14 trucks across three South African provinces, serving 4,200 retailers across formal and informal channels. Routes were planned manually each morning by dispatch supervisors. Vehicles ran half-empty on outbound legs and returned with capacity that could not be re-sold. Fuel and labour were the two largest cost lines, both growing faster than revenue.
- Manual dispatch with whiteboards and phone calls — every route plan took two hours
- No visibility into what each retailer ordered until invoices reconciled at month-end
- Cash collection tracked on paper — discrepancies surfaced too late to investigate
- Three regional managers running three different systems, with no unified view
