What this looks like concretely

Tracking containers meant logging into the portals of different shipping lines several times a day, retyping statuses into a spreadsheet and calling clients as soon as something changed. Error-prone work, and it did not scale with the number of shipments.

BluePlant built a system that reads those sources itself and brings the statuses together in one overview. Each carrier sits behind its own connector with a shared model underneath, so a new one can be added without rebuilding the rest. Whatever has been retrieved is stored, so a source that is briefly unreachable does not leave gaps.

Orders came in by email, were tracked in a spreadsheet, and at the end of the month were turned into invoices by hand. The same data went in three times, and invoicing took days.

BluePlant brought the administration and the invoicing together into one system. An order is entered once and then moves through its own steps; invoices come out based on what was actually delivered. The link to the accounting package means nothing has to be retyped.

What mattered was that it stayed recognisable for the people who work with it. The steps in the system follow the steps they already used, only without the spreadsheets in between.

Equipment spread across different locations is hard to keep track of. Reading it meant driving there, and a fault usually only came to light because someone called.

BluePlant built an agent that runs on the equipment itself: it reads the measurements, sends them on, and applies settings that were specified centrally. The management environment shows what is happening per location, and an alert goes out as soon as a value moves outside its margin.