Northline
Three warehouses, three spreadsheets, no single view of a shipment.
The route.
How a request moves through the system, stop by stop. Illustrative, like the rest of this concept.
- Warehouse scans
- Edge sync
- Event log
- Shipment model
- Live view
- Type
- Studio concept
- Category
- Multi-site operations SaaS
- Our role
- Product design, architecture and full-stack build
- Outcome
- Not applicable. Concepts don't get to claim results.
01
Overview
Northline is a studio concept for operators running several warehouses and carriers at once. It replaces a stack of spreadsheets and carrier portals with one live view of every shipment — and one place to deal with the ones going wrong.
02
The challenge
Every carrier reports status differently, on its own schedule, and sometimes more than once. The product only works if the timeline it shows is the truth. Most of the engineering lives below the dashboard.
03
Scope
- Discovery and scoping
- Interface and design system
- Event ingestion and reconciliation
- Web app and site dashboards
- Assistant for reroute proposals
04
Technical decisions
- One timeline per shipment, rebuilt from events.Carrier updates are stored as raw events and folded into a timeline, so late or duplicate updates change the answer instead of corrupting it.
- Tenancy enforced in the database, not the app.Row-level security on every table. A bug in a query can't leak one operator's data to another.
- The assistant proposes. People decide.Reroute suggestions show their reasoning and the shipments affected. Nothing moves without a person approving it.
-- Duplicate or late carrier events are absorbed, not applied twice
insert into carrier_events (tenant_id, shipment_id, carrier_ref, status, occurred_at, payload)
values ($1, $2, $3, $4, $5, $6)
on conflict (tenant_id, carrier_ref) do nothing;
select rebuild_timeline($2);05
Deliverables
- Web app for operators
- Site dashboards
- Carrier integration layer
- Architecture decision records
- Runbooks and handover
Technologies
Next studio concept.
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