Studios
For trucking, distribution, 3PL, and wholesale operations whose existing tools weren’t designed for the way the work actually runs. Where the dispatch software, the maintenance system, and the reporting tools all live separately, and the master Excel sheet is doing the work the ERP can’t.
Your biggest customer mandated the platform. You use it because you have to. You don’t really control how it works, and the only way to get the data out is to copy it somewhere else by hand.
You’re paying for the TMS, a maintenance app, fuel cards, payroll, plus the spreadsheets your team actually runs the operation on. None of them talk in any useful way. The reconciliation lives in somebody’s master Excel sheet.
You can answer “did the company make money this year?” but you can’t answer “did this route, this driver, this customer actually make money?” The numbers live in three or four systems, and putting them together takes someone manually copying data between spreadsheets.
Somebody on your team built a master Excel sheet that holds the operation together. Maintenance schedules, per-customer rates, truck and route tracking, whatever the off-the-shelf tools can’t do. The team trusts the spreadsheet more than the software they pay for.
When the systems are this fragmented, the right move usually isn’t a new ERP. It’s connecting the data you already have so you can finally see what each route, driver, and customer is actually worth.
“In our business, the margin is on the cost side. The customer sets the rate. Knowing what each truck and each route actually costs us is the difference between a profitable year and a flat one.”
— OPERATIONS LEAD, MID-SIZED TRUCKING OPERATION
Most logistics operations we talk to don’t need a new ERP. They need their existing tools to actually talk to each other so visibility into operations and profit stops living in a spreadsheet. We start every engagement by checking whether an integration solves the problem, before we ever talk about building. Sometimes the answer is one click on a software marketplace. We’ll find that out before you sign anything.
Jake, the co-founder of Pilot West Studios, spent nearly a decade building software inside trucking, distribution, and freight forwarding businesses. He understands the operational lingo and can pick up a conversation with your dispatchers, drivers, and operations leads without lag. The developers we put on logistics work do the same. You’re not paying for us to learn your business on the job.
For the businesses where custom is the right move, four things change when you work with us.
Before we write code, we identify the one operational outcome the ERP should produce. Every decision aligns against it. The result is a system your dispatchers, drivers, and warehouse leads can actually use, not a generic ERP forced into a logistics shape.
A flat monthly rate gets you a senior US development team. Scale up during peak season. Scale back when the freight slows. No hourly billing, no surprise invoices.
When the system breaks at 6 AM and the trucks are about to roll, you reach a senior developer who knows your stack, in under sixty minutes*, during business hours. Not a ticket queue. Not a junior on rotation.
*In practice, the average is just a few minutes.
If, in the first sixty days, you decide we’re not the right partner, we refund your first month. As far as we know, no one else in this industry offers this. We do because we’ve never had to honor it.
From the first call to the moment your operations team is using a system built around how logistics actually works. Each step has a clear scope, a clear price, and a clear way out if it isn’t working.
A thirty-minute working call. We map out your operations, your existing tools, and where the friction is. If a configured off-the-shelf system works for you, we’ll point you to one. If custom is the right move, we’ll explain why. You leave with a written roadmap either way.
A scoped engagement to ship the highest-impact piece first. We pick the part of the operation where the friction is greatest, build it, and prove the approach. You own the code from day one. If at any point in the first sixty days you decide we’re not a fit, we refund your first month.
If you’re happy with the work, the engagement continues under the same monthly subscription. We build out the rest: inventory, dispatch, multi-warehouse, EDI, carrier integrations, reporting. Senior US engineers who understand the operational vocabulary.
Each of these clients was running on tools that weren’t designed for the operational reality of moving things, scheduling work, or coordinating a field team. We replaced what didn’t fit with systems built around how the work actually happens.
Their core operations ran on a Visual FoxPro database older than the developers maintaining it. We rebuilt inventory, order management, and warehouse operations on a modern stack designed for distribution work, then migrated the business one feature at a time so the trucks never stopped rolling.
Read the full case study →Their entire estimating, scheduling, and field-operations workflow ran on a single Excel sheet that had grown to thousands of rows and dozens of macros. We replaced it with a custom application that handles bidding, scheduling, dispatch, and field reporting, built around how their operations team actually works.
Read the full case study →NetSuite and SAP are general-purpose ERPs that have logistics modules bolted on. They work for some businesses. For others, the logistics module forces you to think the way the system thinks, instead of the way logistics actually works. Custom is the answer when the off-the-shelf platform’s assumptions don’t match your operations. If NetSuite or SAP would actually serve you, we’ll tell you that on the call.
Yes. Most logistics engagements include integrations with the systems you already run on. We’ve worked with TMS platforms, WMS systems, load boards, EDI, carrier APIs, and the various 3PL portals. The custom platform handles what off-the-shelf can’t, and integrates with what off-the-shelf does well.
From day one. Multi-warehouse and multi-carrier aren’t edge cases in logistics, they’re the default. We design the data model around the reality that stock moves between locations, that the same SKU can ship from three places, and that carriers, lanes, and rates change constantly. The system tracks where things are in real time without manual reconciliation.
We start by shipping the highest-impact piece in four to six weeks, usually inventory or dispatch. Full platform builds typically take six to twelve months depending on complexity. The full system runs alongside whatever you have today until your team is ready to flip the switch on each piece.
EDI is part of most logistics engagements. We support standard transactions (850, 855, 856, 810, 820, and the rest) and integrate with VANs and AS2 endpoints. Where partners use proprietary feeds instead of standard EDI, we build the translation layer.
That’s a common situation in trucking and dedicated freight. The customer mandates the platform, you have to use it, and you don’t really control how it works. The right move usually isn’t replacing it. It’s connecting it to the rest of your stack so the data flows out into your maintenance, fuel, payroll, and reporting tools. The TMS keeps doing what your customer needs. The integration layer gives you the operational visibility the TMS doesn’t.
This is the rule, not the exception. Most trucking operations we talk to are paying for several tools that don’t talk: a TMS the customer chose, a maintenance app that didn’t get used, fuel cards, payroll, and somebody’s master Excel sheet. We connect the systems already in place so per-truck profitability stops living in a spreadsheet. If the maintenance tool was clunky and got dropped, we’ll figure out what’s worth replacing versus what just needs a real integration.
A thirty-minute working session. We listen to how your operation actually runs, where the system fights you, and what the dispatchers and warehouse leads have built workarounds for.
If a configured off-the-shelf platform works for you, we’ll tell you. If custom is the right move, we’ll explain why, and what the build looks like. Either way, the answer is honest.
A written roadmap, including our honest recommendation and (if custom is the right move) the plan to get there. Free to keep, whether or not we work together.