From chasing every shipment by phone to a platform their customers run themselves.

The starting point

The business ran on a Microsoft Access database that had quietly grown for years past what it was ever built for. Records were inconsistent and easy to enter wrong, links between them broke often, and the daily essentials (sending customer updates, checking shipment status, setting up new systems) were all done by hand. It worked, until it didn’t.

The brief was not a flashy rewrite. It was to put the business on foundations it could grow on, without losing a single day of operations along the way.

What changed for their customers

A customer-facing tracking platform replaced the old phone-and-email routine of chasing status updates. Daily active users rose 20% over the legacy system, and freight-status enquiries fell 80% as customers started serving themselves. Pages that list shipments and records used to take 4 to 5 seconds on every click. They now load in under a second.

What changed for their staff

Status reports that staff used to compile by hand, around 2 hours every day, were fully automated. Checking shipping-line websites for ETA changes across roughly 180 shipments a day, another 3 hours of daily manual work, was replaced by an automated ETA system with an approvals dashboard and a full history of every change. Together, around 5 hours of manual work a day, gone.

What changed for the business

Infrastructure moved to AWS, cutting recurring hosting costs by around 76%, roughly £23,000 a year, with better scalability and control. Setting up a new environment used to take about 1.5 weeks. It now takes under 3 hours, which means new ideas reach customers in hours rather than weeks.

The foundations, the part that lasts

Underneath the visible wins, the groundwork is what keeps it standing. The data was restructured so records stay consistent and mistakes are caught at the source instead of surfacing later. Access to internal systems was locked down properly. A single audit trail now records who changed what and when, reused across multiple systems, giving the business a clear and trustworthy history. And the entire migration happened while the company kept trading. Old and new systems stayed connected throughout, with no downtime.

When the business changed shape

When a subsidiary was sold off and could no longer sit inside the company’s infrastructure, we built a partner portal so they could keep working as a secure external user. The separation was clean and the working relationship carried on without interruption.

What it adds up to

This is what “software built to last” means in practice. Not the newest tools for their own sake, but a business that runs faster, costs less, and stands on foundations its owners can actually trust.