Snapshot
Multi-carrier parcel orchestration at Locus.
Enterprise shippers rarely live on one carrier. One order wants the fastest option, another the cheapest reliable one, another a regional partner. The operational question is easy to say and hard to answer: which carrier should take this parcel, right now, under these conditions? Done by hand it means a dispatcher in a dozen carrier portals with a spreadsheet open beside them. ShipFlex put that decision behind one orchestration layer, carrier selection, assignment rules, execution, and tracking on a single surface.
I came back to Locus for this through my studio, Sharpener Design, after three years there as Principal Product Designer. The brief was a mentor’s: design the product through the hands of the team who would own it after I left.
The shape of the work
The work split into four zones, an add-orders wizard, a carrier quote lifecycle, a rule engine, and whitelabelled tracking, all sitting on one four-state status taxonomy (Open, Planning, Execution, Closed) that every carrier mapped into, so a dispatcher could reason across a dozen carriers with a single mental model.
The rule editor was the sharpest call. Carrier assignment depends on weight, zone, cost, delivery promise, carrier performance, and exceptions. I kept it a readable list of conditions and actions, not a flowchart, because a flowchart implies a tree and these rules were closer to a stack. The product needed logic; the interface needed language.
The smallest feature was the largest lift. Recurring batches used to force a dispatcher to log in at three in the morning, because the job ran when the job ran. We put it on a calendar: a month grid where batches schedule in advance, repeat on a rule, pause for a holiday, or move with a drag. Time given back, hours at a time, is one of the few enterprise design wins the user actually feels.
What I would sharpen now
The rule editor was the right starting point, but it should simulate against sample orders before a team activates rules at scale. Operations people need to see the consequence before they trust the automation. That is the next version’s job.
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