Every other business does its work where it can watch it. A transport company does its work four hundred kilometres away, at somebody else's gate — and the record of it comes home in a cab, days later, on paper. That is where the margin goes.
A composite South African road freight and distribution business: regional multi-drop out of two depots, linehaul on the JHB–Durban corridor, and a handful of cross-border runs into SADC. Substitute your own figures anywhere.
| Part of the business | What it does | Scale |
|---|---|---|
| Distribution | Multi-drop regional work out of two depots, mostly next-dayRigid trucks on fixed and semi-fixed routes | 190drops per day |
| Linehaul | Truck-tractors and trailers on the JHB–Durban corridor, drop-and-hookPlus occasional cross-border into Botswana and Zimbabwe | 18truck-tractors |
| The fleet | Owned and financed, maintained in an in-house workshopMore trailers than tractors, which is the whole point of drop-and-hook — and the whole problem | 42 + 34vehicles + trailers |
| Depots | Main depot with a cross-dock, plus a coastal satelliteGate, weighbridge, yard, workshop | 2sites |
| Customers | Contract and spot, invoiced on proof of delivery | 40active accounts |
| People | 68 drivers, 22 workshop, 18 depot and warehouse, 14 operations and admin, 8 gate and security | 130headcount |
Ask a transport operator what goes wrong and they will talk about breakdowns and traffic. Ask their financial manager and you get a different answer: the load was delivered on the 3rd, invoiced on the 19th, and paid in March.
Once the gate closes behind a vehicle, the next reliable information is a phone call from the driver, or from the customer — and the second one is never good news.
A driver sits two hours at a receiving bay. It is billable under most contracts. It is almost never billed, because you cannot invoice what you cannot prove.
Signed on a clipboard, folded into a door pocket, and handed in when the driver next sees the depot — creased, sometimes illegible, sometimes never.
The single biggest driver of debtor days is not a slow-paying customer. It is an invoice that went out sixteen days after the delivery, and a query that takes a week to answer.
Fuel, tyres, maintenance, standing and empty running get spread evenly across work that is not remotely even. So the loss-making lane keeps running.
Thirty-four trailers on the ground, and no single person can say which are loaded, which are empty, and which have been waiting three weeks for a workshop slot.
The table below is illustrative — put a week of your own data into it and the shape will be roughly this, which is the uncomfortable part. Only one line of the five is measured properly today, and it is not the expensive one.
| Where the hours go | What it is | Hours | Measured today? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Driving | Revenue-earning movement — the only part anybody thinks of as the job | 7 h 20 | Yes — by the tracking system |
| Loading and unloading | At your dock and at theirs | 3 h 10 | Partly — start and end, by hand |
| Standing at customer gates | Queuing, waiting for a bay, waiting for someone to signBillable under most contracts. Rarely billed. | 2 h 40 | No |
| Yard and depot turnaround | Waiting for a load, a trailer, a driver or a workshop slot | 4 h 30 | No |
| Statutory rest and breaks | Required, and not the problem | 6 h 20 | Partly |
| A full day | Of which roughly seven hours is unmeasured and unpriced | 24 h 00 |
Illustrative distribution vehicle, averaged over a working day. Replace with the client's own telematics and gate data at survey — the point is the pattern, not the figures.
The spine here is not a production line, it is a journey — from the order landing in an inbox to the money landing in the bank. Each stage replaces a piece of paper or a phone call with a timestamped event.
Bookings arrive by email, by phone and increasingly by WhatsApp. The planner builds tomorrow on a whiteboard or a spreadsheet, from memory of which driver knows which route and which vehicle is due a service.
When the planner is on leave, the operation runs visibly worse for a week.
Fuse gives contract customers a front door to place and track their own work, so the booking arrives as a record rather than as a message somebody has to transcribe. Relay holds the day's runs as an assignable plan rather than a whiteboard.
Ledger carries the customer, the account and the terms — so the planner can see that an account is on stop before the vehicle is loaded rather than after it has delivered.
The vehicle is loaded against a picking sheet. The driver signs for the load, collects a delivery note book, and leaves through a gate where a guard writes a registration number into a book.
If something was short-loaded, it surfaces at the first drop, 90 minutes away.
TAG reads the load through the dock door, so what is physically on the vehicle is reconciled against what the run says should be on it — the short-load is caught at the depot, not at the first drop.
Ephoro takes the driver and vehicle at the gate by licence and disc scan in seconds, giving a real departure timestamp. Relay pushes the run to the driver's phone, and Flux books out the straps, load bars and handheld against that driver. The phone itself is held by Cipher — locked to the apps the job needs, and wipeable from the office the day it goes missing.
The tracking system shows a dot on a map. It does not show whether the run is ahead or behind, which drops are done, or whether the third one failed.
A customer phones to ask where their delivery is, and the controller phones the driver to find out.
Relay is the one application in the suite built for exactly this. The control tower shows the run against its plan — done, in progress, failed — not just a vehicle against a road. The driver works a run sheet rather than a book.
The customer gets their own tracking link, which removes the call rather than answering it faster. This does not replace your tracking provider and is not trying to — see the limits section.
The driver arrives, queues, waits for a bay, and eventually gets a signature and a stamp on a paper note. Two hours of standing leaves no trace anywhere.
A short delivery or damage is written on the note in biro, and argued about six weeks later when the claim arrives.
The driver checks in on arrival and out on departure, so standing time becomes a timestamped fact and therefore an invoiceable one. This single change is usually the fastest money in the whole blueprint.
Proof of delivery is signed on the phone at the door, with a photograph and a note against the exception — so a damage claim is answered with evidence captured at the moment, not reconstructed from a biro annotation.
The vehicle returns, the trailer is dropped somewhere in the yard, and the driver goes home. Finding a specific trailer the next morning is a walk.
Thirty-four trailers, and the only reliable way to know the state of the yard is to go and look at it.
TAG Auto finally earns its place. It is built to walk a yard of vehicles in one pass and flag what has been standing too long — which in a trailer yard is not a curiosity, it is capital sitting still.
Ephoro closes the loop on the gate with a real return timestamp, so turnaround becomes measurable. Flux takes the straps, bars and handheld back off the driver, which is why you stop buying them twice a year.
Services are tracked on a wall planner by odometer reading collected when someone remembers. Certificates of fitness and licence renewals are diarised in Outlook by one person.
A roadside breakdown is a phone call, a call-out, and a cost that lands in the fuel account somewhere.
Orion carries every vehicle and trailer as an asset with its own history: services and breakdowns as jobs, labour and parts costed against the unit that consumed them, and certificates of fitness and licence renewals as recurring tasks that raise themselves rather than depending on one person's calendar.
Ledger holds the workshop spares as stock so a critical part at zero is visible beforehand. Vault keeps the roadworthy certificates, insurance schedules and driver files where an inspector or an insurer can be shown them.
PODs come in from the cab, get sorted, get matched to loads, and get scanned. Invoices go out in a batch. A customer queries one, asks for the POD, and the query takes a week because somebody has to find it.
Some loads are never invoiced at all. Nobody knows which, because there is no list of loads that were delivered but not billed.
The POD exists digitally the moment it is signed, so the invoice can be raised the same day rather than the same fortnight. Ledger bills off the completed run, which means a delivered-but-unbilled load is a report rather than a mystery.
When a customer queries an invoice, Fuse lets them open the POD themselves — the query is answered before it becomes a call. Vault holds the signed record behind it. This stage is the whole reason the other six are worth doing.
Thirteen applications behind one Orbit sign-in. This is the sector where Relay leads rather than supports, and where TAG Auto stops being an afterthought.
A control tower plans and assigns runs onto a live map; the driver's phone carries the run sheet, stop check-in and check-out, and proof of delivery signed at the door; the customer gets a public tracking page.
Here: The lead application of this blueprint. It is the only one built specifically for this sector, and it carries stages 1 through 4 on its own — including the timestamps that make standing time billable.
One set of double-entry books carrying quotes, invoices, credit notes, debtors, creditors, banking and stock. Ageing includes unallocated receipts, so credits on account cannot hide.
Here: Invoicing off the completed run rather than off a pile of paper, workshop spares as stock, and debtors ageing a transport business can act on. Rate cards by lane are a customisation.
Carries a job from logged to closed: scheduling, labour and parts costed against that asset's own history, an SLA, and recurring tasks that raise themselves.
Here: The workshop. Every vehicle and trailer as an asset with its service history; certificates of fitness and licence renewals as recurring jobs rather than one person's Outlook reminders.
Reads the South African driver's licence barcode and the vehicle licence disc at the gate, so a person and a vehicle are signed in or out by scan in seconds.
Here: Both depot gates. A real departure and return timestamp on every vehicle movement, which is what turns yard turnaround from an opinion into a number.
Tags every vehicle on a yard so the whole yard is walked in one pass, and flags units that have been standing too long.
Here: The sector where this application finally makes obvious sense. 34 trailers is 34 assets either working or standing, and knowing which is which daily is the difference between running 34 and needing 38.
UHF at 860–960 MHz. Fixed readers to 33 dBm read 500-plus tags a second at ranges to 20 m; the handheld is a rugged Android terminal with the same range plus barcode.
Here: Dock-door readers at both depots and the cross-dock, so a short-load is caught at the door rather than at the first drop. Roll-cages and returnable equipment counted in one pass.
Customers log requests, follow progress and see their own sites, assets and contracts. What they log lands in Orion and Ledger rather than in somebody's inbox.
Here: Contract customers book their own work, track their own loads and pull their own PODs when they query an invoice — the most effective way to shorten a query cycle is to remove it.
A personal drive for everyone and shared drives per team behind the same Orbit sign-in, with links you stay in control of and a restorable trash.
Here: Signed PODs, roadworthy certificates, insurance schedules, driver files, and cross-border manifests and permits — filed against the vehicle, the driver or the load they belong to.
Equipment booked out against a named person and a place, verified by barcode, with the audit trail kept.
Here: Straps, load bars, chains, tail-lift keys, fuel cards, pallet jacks and the handhelds — against a named driver. The unglamorous line that quietly costs a fleet a fortune every year.
Staff clock in from the app or a fixed point. The manager's roll call shows who is on site, who is late and what the week is costing.
Here: Depot, warehouse and workshop attendance, and driver shift start and end. Read the limits section before positioning this against driver hours — it is an attendance system, not a fatigue-management one.
Contacts organised by company, industry and province. Mail built from blocks and rendered server-side, sent cleanly, and reported back on.
Here: Rate increase notices, service disruption notices and the statement run. Also the driver recruitment list, which in this industry is a standing requirement rather than an occasional one.
Registration, invitations, a check-in desk a scanner links to by QR, live arrival statistics and walk-in registration at the door.
Here: The one supporting application of the thirteen. It earns its place on driver safety and induction days and customer events — real, but it should carry no weight in the business case.
Built on Google's Android Management API. A device enrols by scanning a durable QR code and lands on the policy chosen for it — the apps it may run, the settings it may change, and kiosk mode if it should only ever do one job. From the console you can push an app, lock a handset somebody left behind, watch data usage, draw a geofence, and wipe a leaver's device.
Here: Sixty-eight driver handsets — by some distance the largest device estate in any of these blueprints. Kiosk-lock the phone to the driver app so it cannot become a personal device, wipe a leaver's handset the day they go, and see which driver is burning the data bundle.
Orbit itself is the control plane underneath all thirteen: one sign-in, per-application entitlement, and per-user permissions down to section and action, so a driver, a controller, a workshop foreman and the financial manager see four different systems.
Indicative South African market ranges for the categories of software an operator this size is typically already paying for. Note the second row: telematics stays, and any proposal that implies otherwise is wrong.
| What they pay for today | Orbit application | Indicative today, per month |
|---|---|---|
| Transport management or fleet software | Relay + Ledger | R12 000 – 30 000 |
| Vehicle tracking and telematics, 42 vehiclesOrbit does not replace this and does not try to. Leave it in the client's budget. | Not replaced | R8 400 – 21 000 |
| Accounting package, about 15 users | Ledger | R6 000 – 14 000 |
| Fleet maintenance or workshop software | Orion | R3 000 – 8 000 |
| Driver app or third-party proof of delivery | Relay | R2 500 – 7 000 |
| Customer track-and-trace portal | Fuse | R2 500 – 8 000 |
| Clocking terminals and T&A software, 130 staff | Pulse | R3 000 – 7 500 |
| Cloud file storage and POD archive | Vault | R3 000 – 6 000 |
| Access control and gate management | Ephoro | R1 500 – 3 500 |
| Email campaign tool | Beacon | R900 – 2 500 |
| Yard and trailer managementAlmost nobody has this. The cost is the trailers you own because you cannot find the ones you have. | TAG Auto | — |
| Mobile device management, 76 devices68 driver handsets plus the depot handhelds. The largest device estate in any of these blueprints. | Cipher | R2 500 – 7 000 |
| Replaceable software the operator already pays for | Excluding telematics | R36 900 – 93 500 |
Every transport operator has a tracking provider, most have had a bad experience with somebody who promised to replace it, and the fastest way to lose credibility in this sector is to imply that Orbit does. It does not. Relay shows a run against its plan; your tracking provider shows a vehicle against the road. They answer different questions and the client should keep both.
Volunteering this in the first ten minutes buys more trust than anything else in the deck.
A model, not a measured result. The most important thing on this page is the distinction between the two kinds of money below — get that wrong in a boardroom and the rest of the number stops being believed.
Invoicing off a same-day POD instead of a fortnight-old one is the fastest way to move debtor days. On R14.5m of monthly revenue, pulling days sales outstanding from 68 to 52 releases roughly R7.7m of working capital — once. It is a balance-sheet event, not an income-statement one.
What recurs is the financing cost on that cash, which at an illustrative 11% is about R70 800 a month. That recurring figure is what belongs in the table below; the R7.7m belongs in the conversation with the financial director, where it is the single most persuasive number in this document. Presenting the R7.7m as a monthly benefit is the mistake that gets a proposal thrown out.
| Where the money is | Assumption | Per month |
|---|---|---|
| Financing cost of released working capitalThe recurring half of the debtor-days story above | R7.7m released at an illustrative 11% cost of borrowingUse the client's actual facility rate. This line moves a lot. | R70 833 |
| Loads delivered but never invoicedA delivered-but-unbilled report is a thing that simply does not exist today | 0.3% of R14.5m monthly revenue | R43 500 |
| Standing time that becomes provableArrival and departure timestamps at the customer's gate | 90 additional billable detention events a month at R375 | R33 750 |
| Unplanned workshop and roadside costService history and renewals that raise themselves | R800 per vehicle per month across 42 vehicles | R33 600 |
| Trailer fleet held flatYard visibility means you run the trailers you have | 2 trailers not added, at R9 000 finance, licensing and insurance | R18 000 |
| Modelled recurring monthly benefit | Excludes the one-off R7.7m cash release entirely | R199 683 |
R199 683 a month recurring — and that is before the one-off working capital release, which on its own dwarfs any implementation figure in the month it lands. For an operator financing debtors on an overdraft, that release is usually the only argument that matters. Set both against the figures quoted in your proposal.
Note what is not claimed: no new customers, no rate increase, no headcount reduction, no fuel saving and no saving on telematics. Everything above comes from measuring things that are currently estimated.
Close the cash cycle
Close the gate and the yard
Close the loop
Digital POD at the door, the invoice raised off the completed run, and the customer able to pull their own proof. This is the phase that moves debtor days, and it should be sold on its own.
Orbit · Relay · Ledger · Vault · Cipher
Real departure and return timestamps, loads reconciled at the dock door, trailers accounted for, and the workshop running on jobs rather than a wall planner.
Ephoro · TAG · TAG Auto · Orion
The customer portal opened to every account, equipment custody, attendance, and the statement and notice run. By this point cost per load is a real number rather than a monthly average.
Fuse · Flux · Pulse · Beacon · Core
Deliberately front-loaded. Phase one is the one that pays, and in this sector it pays fast enough to fund everything after it.
Transport buyers have been oversold before, more than most. Raising all four of these unprompted is worth more than any feature in the deck.
No CAN-bus data, no driver behaviour scoring, no fuel-sensor integration, no tachograph. Relay shows a run against its plan; your tracking provider shows a vehicle against the road. There is also no integration between the two today — so a controller watches two screens, and that should be said plainly rather than glossed.
It clocks people on and off. It is not a fatigue-management system, it does not calculate driving hours against regulation, and it must never be positioned as covering that obligation. Whatever the operator uses for driving-hours compliance stays exactly where it is.
Ledger has customers, items and invoices; it does not have lanes, trips or rate cards, which are the central commercial artefact of a transport business. Rating a load by lane, weight band and customer is configuration work in the customisation blocks budgeted above — deliverable, but scoped and paid for, not switched on.
It plans, sequences and assigns runs and executes them on the driver's phone. Whether it should also replace a planner's route-optimisation tooling across 190 drops is a question to answer against the current build during the survey, not a promise to make in a first meeting.
Android allows one enterprise mobility manager per device, and switching it is not a settings change — every handset and tablet has to be factory-reset and re-enrolled. Plan it as a scheduled exercise with the fleet in a room, not as a background migration. NBS has done exactly this moving its own fleet off Hexnode, which is why the line is in the plan rather than discovered in week three.
Two more that apply across every sector: Ledger runs one organisation per instance, so a group holding separate legal entities needs separate instances — an architecture decision to take up front. And on cross-border work, Vault holds the manifests, permits and driver documents, but Orbit does not do customs declarations and does not replace a clearing agent.
This blueprint is built on road freight and distribution. The seven stages hold across most of logistics — what changes is which stage carries the weight.
| Operation | What changes | Where the weight moves |
|---|---|---|
| Courier and parcel | Volume replaces value: thousands of small items rather than hundreds of pallets. Scan events per parcel become the whole data model, and the tracking page is a customer-facing product rather than a convenience. | Relay and TAG dominate, and stage 4 becomes an exception-handling exercise. Stage 6 workshop matters far less on a light fleet. |
| Warehousing and 3PL | The depot stops being a transit point and becomes the product. Storage, handling and stock accuracy get billed to the client, so measuring them is the revenue model. | TAG and Ledger move to the front, with stages 2 and 5 carrying the blueprint. Bring in the manufacturing blueprint's stores sections alongside this one. |
| Owner-driver and subcontractor networks | Half the fleet is not yours. Self-billing, subcontractor rate cards and proof that the subbie actually delivered become the core need. | Stage 7 is the entire conversation, and the rate-card customisation gets larger. Fuse flips to face subcontractors as well as customers. |
| Cross-border and bulk | Fewer, larger, longer movements with heavy documentation. Border standing time can run to days, and permits, manifests and clearing paperwork dominate. | Vault moves from supporting to essential, and the standing-time line in the model gets much larger. Confirm the customs boundary early. |
All thirteen applications behind one Orbit sign-in — click a planet to explore what each one does.
Access and yard management: licences and vehicle discs read at the gate in seconds.
The same suite instrumenting the middle of a factory — goods-in, the line, quality, dispatch and recall.
The same suite across a livestock agency and red-meat abattoir, from farm gate to butchery.
