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Caravan Tech

Use cases

What partners bring us, and what gets built.

These are the classes of work Caravan Supply Chain scopes and deploys. Each one describes a situation partners arrive with, the shape a solution generally takes, and what changes operationally once it is running.

These describe categories of work and the engineering approach taken against them. They are not case studies, and no partner, customer, or carrier is identified here.

  1. 01

    ERP integration for multi-leg distribution

    The situation
    Cargo moves through two or more legs, often across modes and across carriers, while the partner's ERP holds the order but not the movement. Visibility resets at every handoff, and the people accountable for the shipment reconstruct its position from email and carrier portals.
    What gets built
    An integration layer between the ERP and transportation execution that normalizes each leg into a single shipment record. Events from every carrier on every leg land against the same object, and the ERP is updated from it rather than being asked to model freight it was never designed for.
    What changes
    One oversight surface across the whole movement, and exceptions that surface at the handoff where they happen instead of at the destination where they are discovered.
  2. 02

    Hyperscale infrastructure buildouts

    The situation
    Data center and large infrastructure projects move high-value, schedule-critical equipment from many vendors into staged delivery windows at a site with limited receiving capacity. Sequence matters more than transit time — material that arrives early is as disruptive as material that arrives late, and the site is coordinating against a different portal for every vendor.
    What gets built
    Staged delivery scheduling driven by site readiness rather than by ship date: vendor shipments normalized into one build schedule, receiving windows and equipment coordinated against it, and chain-of-custody and documentation captured per unit on arrival.
    What changes
    The site works one schedule instead of a dozen vendor portals, and a vendor slipping shows up as a schedule change to plan around rather than as a truck at a closed gate.
  3. 03

    Carrier qualification and network onboarding

    The situation
    Authority, insurance, and safety records live across registries, certificates, and inboxes, and they expire. Keeping a carrier network current is continuous administrative work that quietly degrades until something is discovered at the worst moment.
    What gets built
    One qualification record per carrier, assembled from the sources that already exist and re-checked on a schedule, with expirations and status changes raised as work rather than sitting in a file.
    What changes
    The current state of the network is a query rather than an audit, and onboarding a carrier is a repeatable process instead of a person remembering the steps.
  4. 04

    Documentation and settlement workflow

    The situation
    Bills of lading, proofs of delivery, and accessorial paperwork arrive as photos, scans, and attachments in whatever quality the field produced them. Settlement waits on somebody opening each one, and disputes are argued from documents nobody can find quickly.
    What gets built
    Document capture tied to the shipment it belongs to, extraction of the reference fields that settlement actually depends on, and exception-based review so people look at the documents that need a person instead of all of them.
    What changes
    Billing and carrier payment close against complete files, and the paper trail for a shipment is retrievable as a unit.
  5. 05

    Appointment and dock scheduling across facilities

    The situation
    Warehouses, plants, and receiving facilities each hold their own appointment book, and the negotiation happens by phone. Nobody upstream can see the constraint until a truck is turned away, and a rescheduled appointment reaches the driver last.
    What gets built
    Scheduling surfaces that expose real facility capacity to the parties who need to book against it, with changes propagating to the carrier, the driver, and the customer contact through the channels each of them actually uses.
    What changes
    Appointments are set against capacity that exists, and a change is a notification rather than a discovery at the gate.

The common thread

Different networks, the same underlying objects.

None of these are built from scratch. Each partner’s data is normalized into the same set of objects — shipment, stop, party, equipment, event, document — and the deployment is assembled against those, so what is genuinely specific to a partner stays small and identifiable.

That is also what decides whether a piece of work gets a screen at all. The design methodology, including the question we ask before anything is given an interface, is written up in the docs.

Read the design docs

Something not listed

This list describes what we are asked for most, not the limit of what we scope. Discovery exists precisely because the useful version of a problem is rarely the one it was first described as.

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