The problem it solves
At 4:30am the depot supervisor has a whiteboard, a printed manifest, and 47 drivers waiting in a loading bay that was designed for 30. One driver is loading the wrong parcels into the wrong van because the cage tag faded in the rain. Another is waiting 22 minutes for a forklift because nobody knows which dock is free. The ERP says 2,400 shipments landed overnight; the floor is counting 2,311 and can’t find the other 89 until someone physically walks the inbound cage wall with a clipboard. By the time the first van rolls out, the planned 5:30am departure has slipped to 6:17am — and that 47-minute delay cascades into missed first-attempt windows, premium-service SLA breaches, and a customer-service queue that won’t clear until lunch. This is the depot’s invisible tax: every hub loses 20-30% of its theoretical throughput to coordination gaps that never show up in any dashboard because they live between the systems.
What it is
Smart Depot Operations is Shipsy’s autonomous hub-orchestration layer — the system that replaces the whiteboard, the clipboard, and the radio chatter with a live, multi-role operating picture that runs on the supervisor’s phone, the loader’s scanner, and the driver’s app simultaneously. It is not a yard-management tool bolted onto a TMS. It is the depot’s actual control surface: system-driven sort, guided loading sequences down to cage-to-van mapping, dock assignment, and throughput telemetry — all running off the same event bus that feeds Astra’s load-balancing planner upstream and the driver performance scorecards downstream. What’s new-age about it: the depot stops being a black box between line-haul and last-mile. Every scan, every dock-door opening, every loader assignment becomes a signal that Astra uses to re-plan in-flight, and that supervisors see before a bottleneck becomes a 47-minute slip.
Core capabilities
| Capability | What it does |
|---|---|
| System-driven sort | Inbound shipments are sorted by destination cluster, service-level, and outbound wave — not by the order they landed. The sort plan is generated per cutoff and streamed to handheld scanners so floor staff route cages to the correct staging lane on the first scan. |
| Guided loading sequence | The loader app shows which cage goes into which van, in what order (last stop loaded first), with a live progress bar per vehicle. The driver sees the same picture in her app — no paper manifest reconciliation. |
| Supervisor mobile view | A single-pane floor view shows every bay, every vehicle, every wave status, every exception. Supervisors approve deviations, re-assign loaders, and unlock docks from the same screen — no radio, no chasing. |
| Dynamic dock assignment | Docks are assigned to vehicles based on the shortest-path-to-staging and current congestion. When a vehicle runs late, the dock re-assigns automatically and the loader gets a new target in his scanner. |
| Throughput telemetry | Packages-per-hour, cage-to-van cycle time, dock utilization, loader productivity — all measured per shift, per bay, per wave. Cutoff-miss predictions surface 60-90 minutes before they happen. |
| Exception handling inline | Damaged parcels, missing scans, mis-routed cages, and address-intelligence exceptions get routed to the right resolver (loader, supervisor, Clara, Address Intelligence Service) without anyone touching a phone. |
| Wave orchestration | Multiple dispatch waves — early-morning premium, standard, on-demand reinjection, returns pickup — are run as parallel timelines with their own cutoffs, staging lanes, and loader pools. No cross-contamination. |
| Integration with Astra | The planner sees real loader capacity, real dock availability, and real vehicle status — and re-plans loads in-flight when a wave is slipping. A missed cutoff at one hub triggers re-allocation across adjacent hubs. |
| Linehaul-to-last-mile handoff | The arrival of a linehaul trailer auto-triggers the sort plan and primes the outbound wave. Handoff time — the most-wasted portion of the depot day — compresses by 30-50% in production. |
| Returnable asset tracking | Cages, crates, totes, and roll-cages carry their own scan identity. The system knows which cage went out on which van and expects it back — feeding the same ledger as Returnable Packaging Intelligence. |
| Cutoff & SLA enforcement | Every wave has a hard cutoff. Parcels that can’t make the cutoff get automatically re-slotted to the next wave with customer comms handled by Clara — no silent SLA breaches. |
| Supervisor KPI canvas | A depot-health score per shift combines throughput, accuracy, cutoff adherence, and safety events into a single number that rolls up to regional ops leadership. |
How it works
The depot runs as an event-driven choreography of roles — linehaul arrival, sort, staging, load, dispatch — each emitting scans and signals into a single event bus. The orchestration brain sits on that bus: it knows the plan, the current state, the cutoff pressure, and the capacity; it emits instructions back to the right device for the right role. A loader’s scanner only ever shows the next action for that loader. The supervisor’s mobile view aggregates across bays. The planner upstream reacts to floor reality before the floor reality becomes a delay. The architecture is deliberately thin at the device end — most devices are off-the-shelf Android scanners — and thick at the orchestration layer, where the hard decisions (wave allocation, dock re-assignment, cutoff prediction) happen as streams, not as nightly reports.
The workflow below traces a single wave — from linehaul ETA through van dispatch — showing how the orchestration surface turns ten parallel floor conversations into one coordinated pipeline. Every action the floor takes is visible to the supervisor in under 10 seconds; every slip the supervisor sees is already being re-planned by Astra.
Proven outcomes
| Customer type & scale | Outcome |
|---|---|
| Southeast Asia’s largest air-logistics network, 164 hubs across APAC | 20+ hours/week of operations time reclaimed per hub; 20% driver productivity gain; autonomous ops across network |
| Leading Western European parcel operator with 50%+ national market share, 8M+ shipments | Delivery-window adherence lifted from ~30% to 90%+ with coordinated depot-to-last-mile handoff; $5M+/year run-rate savings |
| A national postal operator powering 90% of mail to 200+ countries | First-attempt delivery rate reached 90% with depot-grade address intelligence and sort orchestration |
| A premium Indian B2B express network, 49 cities, 3,500+ pincodes | Greenfield depot network stood up at scale with appointment-delivery accuracy from day one; 16-18% cost reduction |
Integrations
- WMS — Manhattan, Blue Yonder, SAP EWM, native warehouse stacks with open scan APIs.
- TMS & ERP — SAP, Oracle, Microsoft Dynamics; Shipsy TMS for native integration.
- Scanning hardware — Zebra, Honeywell, Unitech Android scanners; ring scanners for hands-free loading.
- Dock & yard sensors — RFID dock-door readers, trailer-presence sensors, yard-camera ANPR.
- Planning — Astra (native) for load re-balancing and wave-level capacity decisions.
- Driver & CX layer — Shipsy driver app for guided pickup; Clara for cutoff-miss customer comms.
- Linehaul partners — Carrier APIs for trailer ETAs; IndiGo cargo and similar air-cargo feeds for inbound airfreight.
- Analytics — Native export to Snowflake, BigQuery, Databricks; standard BI connectors.
Deployment
Most networks go live with Smart Depot Operations inside 10-14 weeks, with a pilot hub in week 5-7.
- Phase 1 · Discovery (Week 1-3) — Time-motion study at two representative hubs; map current sort logic, wave cutoffs, dock assignment rules, and loader shift patterns; define the throughput and cutoff-adherence baselines.
- Phase 2 · Configuration (Week 3-7) — Model the depot layout, staging lanes, and dock inventory; configure wave rules, sort logic, and exception routing; provision scanners and printers.
- Phase 3 · Pilot (Week 7-10) — One hub goes live end-to-end. Success criteria: 15%+ throughput lift, cutoff adherence +20 points, supervisor time-on-floor reduced by at least 40%.
- Phase 4 · Scale (Week 10-14+) — Roll to adjacent hubs by cluster; regional ops command gets the depot-health canvas; Astra re-plans across the network once two or more hubs are live.
Governance runs through a Depot Operations Council — regional ops, hub supervisors, linehaul planning, and last-mile dispatch — that reviews wave rules and cutoff policy monthly. Configuration changes follow a staged rollout (one hub, then cluster, then network) to avoid coordinated disruption.
Security & compliance
- SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, and GDPR-aligned by default.
- Role-based access across supervisor, loader, dispatcher, and regional ops personas; device-level enrollment for scanners.
- Immutable scan ledger — every cage, parcel, and dock movement is append-only, retained per regional customs and post-office regulations.
- 21 CFR Part 11 and GDP modes available for pharma-grade depots handling temperature-controlled SKUs.
- Human-in-the-loop for dock re-assignment overrides, cutoff extensions, and linehaul wave overrides.
- Three-tier confidence scoring on the cutoff predictor — the bottom tier only alerts, never auto-acts.
Case study callouts
Southeast Asia’s largest air-logistics network · 164 hubs
“Rolled guided loading, wave orchestration, and supervisor mobile view across 164 hubs. Supervisors reclaimed 20+ hours a week of coordination time; driver productivity lifted 20%; the network moved to autonomous ops with a leaner regional command.”
Leading Western European parcel operator · 50%+ national market share
“Coordinated depot-to-last-mile handoff lifted delivery-window adherence from 30% to 90% and drove $5M+/year in run-rate savings — the sort-plan-to-driver-app integration was the unlock.”
A national postal operator · 200+ country reach
“Combined depot-grade sort orchestration with address intelligence to reach 90% first-attempt delivery at national scale.”