OrcaScale builds bespoke delivery tracking, surcharge and compliance systems for UK logistics, transport, haulage, courier and waste management companies of roughly 5 to 80 people. Built around how your operation actually runs, not how a software company thinks a transport office should.
Not hypotheticals. This is the week that turns up, one way or another, in almost every conversation we have with an operator. The work gets done and the money comes in, but tracking it all is a grind that never ends.
Deliveries and pick-ups planned on the whiteboard, amended in a spreadsheet, changed again in the drivers' WhatsApp group. Nobody is quite sure which version is current, and the customer was told the first one.
Slots get missed, and every "where's my delivery?" call means ringing the driver to guess an ETA for a customer who has already rung twice. The transport desk spends half the day relaying positions it should just be able to see.
Load weights live on paper in cab folders until someone types them up. Weighbridge tickets get keyed in twice, once at the bridge and once at invoicing, and the two versions do not always agree.
Waiting time, failed deliveries, out-of-hours runs, fuel surcharges. Whatever the person doing the invoicing remembers is what gets billed. The rest is work you did for free, and the leak never shows up as a line item anywhere.
Waste transfer notes, consignment notes, Environment Agency returns, driver hours, vehicle checks. All of it real, most of it done, none of it in one place until month end forces a hunt through vans, inboxes and site offices.
Proof of delivery photos sit in whichever driver's camera roll took them. When a customer disputes a drop three weeks later, someone spends an afternoon hunting for one photo that may or may not still exist.
None of this is a people problem. It is what happens when an operation with its own runs, its own rates and its own paperwork tries to hold all of it in tools that were never shaped around it. The fix is a system shaped around your way, and that is the only kind we build.
Two real things, presented as exactly what they are: a delivered, paid operations platform for a haulage company in your sector, and a free demo build from construction whose figures are projections. The thing that should convince you is neither of them. It is the free working demo of your own system, and we get to that below.
A paid engagement, delivered and in daily use, for a haulage operator whose name stays private under NDA. It covers the full job lifecycle, invoicing, payment runs, document sync and automated chasing of proof of delivery, which is exactly the "POD in a driver's camera roll" problem described above. This is what a system shaped around one haulage operation's runs, rates and paperwork actually looks like. There is no public link and no case study page for it, and that is the deal: the same discretion applies to whatever we build for you.
Different sector, same disease: one owner holding an operation together through spreadsheets and memory. Greg was spending around 8 hours per quote, roughly 5 quotes a week. We took his real categories, his real rates and his real workflow and built a full working platform around them, free, as a demo. It was never a paid engagement, and the numbers above are projections modelled from his own figures, not measured results. The shape of the build is still the point: the subject matter changes; the approach does not.
Maybe. Genuinely. There is good off-the-shelf software in this sector: transport management systems, fleet and telematics platforms, weighbridge software, waste management packages. For plenty of operators, one of them is the right answer.
Not slides, not a proposal document. A real running system, built around your operation, that you click through before any money changes hands.
About ten minutes at /builder: how work comes in, how you price and surcharge it, what compliance you carry, what you use now, who needs access. Ed reads every application himself.
If it is a fit, he builds a working demo of your system, usually within 3 to 7 days. Real software with your runs, your rates and your paperwork in it, not a mock-up or a slide deck.
You click through it together and decide if it is worth taking further. If it misses, you walk away owing nothing, and you keep the written requirements to take elsewhere.
He only takes on a few free builds a month, so not every application gets one. It is how he decides which projects he can do properly, and it cuts both ways.
Once your system is live, one optional monthly care plan covers keeping it healthy and moving: you run the trucks, we run the software. It is part of the offer, priced with your build quote before you commit to anything.
And it is optional either way. The system is yours: you own the code, the data and the database, whether you take a care plan or not. Full details are in the FAQ.
