Nordlicht Logistik
A real-time cockpit for 240 vehicles
A dispatch dashboard that no longer takes 4 seconds to load but 200 milliseconds — and is therefore actually used.
- empty kilometres at the pilot site
- −22%empty kilometres at the pilot site
- to refresh, down from 4 s
- 200 msto refresh, down from 4 s
- to the first production release
- 3 wksto the first production release
The situation
Dispatch worked from a table that took several seconds to refresh. In practice that meant the team kept the tool open but made decisions on the phone. Empty runs only became visible in the monthly report — by which point nothing could be changed.
How we worked
The bottleneck was not the frontend but a query that read the entire history on every call. We moved the data layer to an event model, connected vehicle positions over a stream, and built an interface that updates continuously instead of reloading.
- Event-based data layer instead of queries across the full history
- Vehicle positions streamed rather than polled once a minute
- Map and table views share a single source of truth
- First increment in production at the pilot site after three weeks
Outcome
The cockpit is now the default view in dispatch. Because empty runs become visible while they can still be changed, they have measurably declined — a bigger effect than the raw time saved in the interface.
„We used to have a dashboard nobody opened. Now it is the first tab someone opens in the morning.“