Replacing phone-and-spreadsheet courier bookings with an online platform

One of Japan's largest courier companies took pickup requests by telephone. An operator answered the call, wrote down the address, the time window and the parcel details, and maintained the day's schedule in spreadsheets.

Every request cost operator time, every transcription was a chance to introduce an error, and the volume of calls set a ceiling on how much the operation could grow. Drivers received their runs on paper and had no way to report progress back other than calling in.

• Mapped the existing process end to end with the people doing it (operators, dispatchers and drivers) before designing any screen, because the spreadsheet contained rules nobody had written down.
• Designed a customer-facing booking flow that captured a pickup in a single pass, with address, time window and parcel details validated at entry rather than corrected later by an operator.
• Designed a driver application for the run itself: the day's assignments, sequencing, status updates and proof of pickup, built for one-handed use in a vehicle.
• Gave dispatchers a live operational view, so the schedule was a shared source of truth rather than a spreadsheet on one machine.
• Ran the rollout in stages alongside the phone process rather than switching it off, so the operation always had a fallback while confidence was built.

Outcome. Pickup requests moved from telephone and spreadsheets to an online platform used by customers directly. Operational efficiency measured roughly 1.3× against the previous process. Operator time previously spent transcribing calls was returned to exception handling and customer service, and drivers reported status from the application, giving dispatch visibility the paper process could not provide.

Nothing about this project was technically exotic. The difficulty was that a functioning manual process, with years of undocumented rules embedded in it, had to keep running while it was replaced. That pattern repeats constantly in the businesses we work with today.