The gate runs on a register
Plates written by hand, documents checked visually, drivers waiting for a supervisor. Turnaround time is estimated, detention is argued after the fact, and nobody can say which shift is slower.
Industries / Logistics
Logistics, run by systems that finish the work.
Gates that clear themselves, exceptions that surface before the customer calls, and freight bills that match what was actually done.
ANPR gate automation, route intelligence and exception-handling agents.
The picture on the ground
What Logistics actually looks like from the inside.
Logistics is an exception business. The ninety percent that runs to plan needs nobody; the ten percent that does not consumes the whole control tower in phone calls, WhatsApp groups and spreadsheets. The systems already hold the milestone data, but the exception is spotted by a person noticing something rather than by anything watching.
The gate is usually the first place to intervene, because it is measurable and manual. Plate written into a register, driver documents checked by hand, truck idling while a supervisor is found. Plate and container recognition tuned for Indian plates, dust and night conditions, wired to the boom barrier and the yard system, converts a queue into a turnaround time you can put on a dashboard.
Behind that sits document and billing work. LRs, e-way bills, weighbridge slips, proof of delivery and freight invoices with accessorials, detention and diesel escalation. Reconciliation today happens after payment or not at all, which is a quiet, continuous margin leak that a matching engine closes.
Where it hurts
Four pressures we hear in every review meeting.
Named the way your operators name them, not the way a vendor deck names them. If none of these land, we are the wrong partner for this problem.
Exceptions are found by phone call
A delayed line haul, a damaged carton, a wrong address, an RTO. The control tower learns about most of them when the customer asks, and the first hour is spent reconstructing what happened.
Freight bills never quite match
Accessorials, waiting charges, detention and fuel escalation against a rate contract nobody re-reads. Manual sampling catches a fraction, and the rest is paid.
Proof goes missing exactly when it is needed
Signed LRs, weighbridge slips and delivery proofs are scattered across branches and phones. A damage claim arrives ninety days later and the evidence hunt begins.
What we build
The work that pays for itself first.
Ordered the way we would sequence them in a logistics engagement. Each one links to the capability behind it.
ANPR gate automation
Number plate and container recognition tuned for Indian plates, weather and night conditions, wired to the boom barrier and writing the gate-in and gate-out event straight into the TMS or yard system.
Load and damage condition capture at the dock
Automatic capture at loading and unloading — seal condition, carton count, visible damage — timestamped and attached to the consignment, so a claim is settled from evidence rather than from recollection.
An exception-handling agent on the control tower
Watches milestones against the plan, detects the delay or deviation as it happens, reaches out to the driver or branch for the reason, drafts the customer update and escalates only what needs a person.
Freight invoice reconciliation
Every carrier invoice matched line by line against the rate contract, the trip record and the actual detention and waiting time, with only the exceptions routed to the finance team for a decision.
A control-tower assistant over SOPs and history
Customer SLAs, standard operating procedures, packaging norms and the history of how similar exceptions were resolved, answered with a citation — so a new dispatcher handles their first escalation like an experienced one.
A driver app that works without signal
Offline-first capture of proof of delivery, photographs, e-way bill status and exception reasons, syncing when the network returns. The data quality problem in last-mile visibility is usually a capture problem.
The systems it plugs into.
Read-only to begin with, write access only where a workflow needs it, and every integration documented before it goes near production.
Transport management system trip and milestone dataWarehouse management system tasks and inventoryGPS, telematics and driver app eventsGate cameras, ANPR and weighbridge records
E-way bill and GST portal recordsCustomer order feeds over EDI or APIFreight invoices and rate contractsCold chain temperature loggers
How it gets judged
Agreed before the build, measured after it.
These are targets and mechanisms, not results borrowed from somebody else’s project. We baseline each one on your data in the first fortnight, and report against that baseline monthly.
Gate turnaround time
Gate-in to gate-out per truck, per shift. The most immediate number an automated gate has to move, and the easiest to baseline honestly.
Exceptions detected before the customer calls
Share of delays and deviations raised by the system first. This is what a control-tower agent is actually for.
Detention and demurrage cost per month
Recorded from gate events rather than negotiated from memory, which changes both the cost and the conversation with the carrier.
Proof-of-delivery completeness
Share of consignments with a usable, timestamped proof attached at delivery. Claims defence depends entirely on this number.
What we design around
The constraints come first, not at the security review.
Personal data of drivers and consignees
Driver identity, location history and consignee contact details are personal data under the DPDP Act. Location tracking is scoped to the working trip, retention is time-boxed, and access is limited to the operational roles that need it.
Camera footage and purpose limitation
Plate recognition at a gate is a security and operations purpose. Footage is retained for a defined window, plate reads are held separately from the video, and the system does not quietly become a general surveillance archive.
Statutory transport records
E-way bills, LRs and GST records carry statutory retention and format requirements. Anything automated has to leave the same auditable record a manual process would, and reconcile with what was filed.
Customer data-sharing terms
Shipment data usually belongs contractually to the shipper. Multi-client deployments are separated at the tenancy level so one customer's consignment data never becomes another's dataset.
This is how we scope and build, not legal advice. Your compliance, risk and legal teams stay the authority on what applies to your organisation, and we work to their reading of it.
Your first project
Start narrow. Prove the number. Then scale it.
One gate at one plant or distribution centre. ANPR on the inbound and outbound lanes, wired to the barrier and the yard system, with turnaround time baselined manually for two weeks first so the improvement is measured against something real. Four to six weeks, one site, and the plate model that comes out of it transfers to every other gate you own.
Discovery Sprint
1–2 weeksWe sit with your operators, map the workflows, and score every candidate use case on value, data readiness and risk. You leave with a ranked backlog and a cost model.
- Use-case scorecard
- Data readiness report
- Costed roadmap
Proof of Value
3–4 weeksWe build the single highest-value agent against your real data and measure it against the humans doing that job today. If the number is not there, we say so.
- Working prototype
- Evaluation set
- Benchmark vs. baseline
Bring us one workflow from your floor.
Describe how logistics works in your organisation — the systems, the constraints, the part that goes wrong every week. We will tell you whether it is worth automating and what the first project would cost.