3,500 packages, 2 people, 2 weeks — a state-tender expedition operation, fully automated

A small distribution company won a state tender, subcontracted from a national foundation, to deliver thousands of educational packages to teachers all over the country — on a tight timeline, under audit. The company had two people available to run the operation. Manually handling contact submissions, generating expedition paperwork, provisioning logistics, tracking shipments, and reporting back to the foundation simply wasn’t feasible at that scale. They didn’t have a workflow problem — they had a "we will not survive this contract without one" problem.

What we built

A custom operating system covering the full delivery lifecycle: a self-service contact intake that captured teacher submissions and validated addresses up front; automatic expedition-document generation — labels, manifests, delivery slips — pushed straight to the courier; logistics provisioning, with pickups scheduled in batches, capacity matched to volume, and exceptions flagged before they shipped; real-time expedition tracking, with proof-of-delivery rolled up per region and per program; and a clean audit trail for the foundation — every package traceable, every status change timestamped, every report a button-click away.

How we built it

A Next.js dashboard for the two operators, Supabase as the source of truth for contacts, packages, expeditions, and audit events, and durable background jobs in Trigger.dev — each one owning a single step: intake validation with OpenAI in the loop for messy data; expedition documents drafted from Google Docs templates and finalised with Stirling PDF (merged manifests, batched labels, signed delivery slips) into Google Drive; teacher outreach through Gmail; courier handoff via carrier APIs; and status sync from the warehouse system. Carrier and warehouse integrations sit behind one internal interface, so the same dashboard works whichever logistics provider or warehouse the program runs on.

The outcome

3,500+ packages in two weeks per expedition, two people running it without burning out, and a foundation that came back twice. The partnership is now on its third program — the system is the standing infrastructure for whatever comes next.