Cloud DMS for Logistics, Courier and Field Service Networks across South Africa

Each stage writes its own record. Receipt at the port-side hub in Durban or Cape Town, throughput across the sortation belt, the inland terminal at City Deep in Johannesburg, branch stock in Pretoria, Bloemfontein, Gqeberha, East London or Polokwane, and finally allocation to a last-mile driver or van. Every tier carries routing rules and SLA targets set against the running time and fuel cost of the corridor it sits on, which is how a hub that has begun to drift shows up before the next dispatch cycle rather than in the month-end review.

Yes, and that is why the driver and technician app was built offline-first rather than merely offline-tolerant. Coverage thins out on long rural routes and in pockets of dense trading areas such as Warwick Junction in Durban or around the Bree taxi rank in Johannesburg. Scans, proof of delivery, cash and card collections and job updates are written to the handset and pushed up the moment the device finds data again, so nothing between the field and the hub is left to anyone's memory.

A waybill number is issued at booking and stays with the load from there. It is scanned at the port-side hub, on the sortation belt, into and out of the branch, at the last-mile bin, and again when the driver goes out for delivery. Skip a scan and an exception is raised there and then, so a parcel cannot slip quietly out of the network somewhere between the coast and an inland branch, and the tracking page a customer refreshes shows where the item genuinely is.

Vaccines, medicines and frozen or chilled goods each sit inside a threshold band set by category. Sensors log temperature along the route, and a breach reaches the dispatcher and the receiving site automatically instead of being discovered at offloading. The trail runs from the origin cold room to the door, batch by batch, and it holds enough detail to answer a SAHPRA or customer query, so a distributor supplying pharmacies and clinics can show the chain never broke on the trip inland.

Every subcontracted fleet, franchise partner and owner-driver has a contract master behind it holding volume slabs, distance and corridor bands, the fuel surcharge and the SLA tier, all priced in rand. Payouts are generated against the on-time and POD-confirmed rate, not against an invoice someone typed up on a Friday. Card, instant EFT and PayShap receipts post to the partner ledger on their own, so no rate card is looked up by hand and no partner ends the month over- or under-paid.

Jobs are allocated by territory and by skill, and the day is planned off GPS pins because street addressing is inconsistent in parts of most metros. Spares are counted in three places: the central warehouse, the branch, and the technician's own van boot. Consumption is booked against the customer site so the real cost of the job is known, and a replenishment alert fires as soon as van stock falls under the agreed level. The point of all of it is that nobody arrives at a site in Polokwane or Gqeberha without the part in the boot.

At the port-side hub the shipper manifest is scanned and matched on piece count, weight and waybill ID. Anything that does not agree is held as an exception before the load is released inland. Sortation and branch receipts close each handover after that. Goods receipt covers the piece count, a photograph on any damage, and confirmation that the seals were intact — which is how a short-landed or tampered consignment is caught where it entered the network instead of three branches later.

The driver closes the attempt with a reason — nobody at the address, an address that turned out to be wrong or incomplete, a refusal, or cash on delivery that was not there — and an RTO opens on the back of it. A damage claim will not submit without a photograph and the waybill reference. Once it is approved a credit note is raised and the collection is slotted onto the next outbound run on that corridor. Because an address is often given by landmark rather than street number, the app also stores a GPS pin and a note, so the second attempt goes straight to the door.

Yes. REST APIs move data both ways with SAP, Oracle, Microsoft Dynamics, Sage or a transport and hub system your team built in-house. Bookings, manifests, goods receipts, returns, POD records and invoices travel across without being retyped. Card and instant EFT payout reconciliation feeds back into the finance ledger, and every invoice carries the fields a SARS VAT return expects.

Operations reads on-time performance, hub throughput, the RTO rate and SLA-breach exposure corridor by corridor. Hub supervisors watch dock productivity, how far sortation has got, and vehicle and driver utilisation. Finance works through revenue per consignment, the fuel-surcharge run rate, profitability by contract, and what came back in cash against what came back on card. Ask 1Voice AI in plain language which N3 lane lost margin this week and it answers off the same data.