The trailer is backed onto the bay, the pallet is wrapped, and nothing moves: the consignment note refuses to come out of the TMS. Or printing dies at twenty to four, a quarter of an hour ahead of the collection round. In this trade you measure an incident in late deliveries and contract penalties, never in hours of downtime. Our part is to make separate applications behave as one chain and then watch that chain from here, so a break is dealt with before the loading bay ever hears about it.
Five places where information tends to evaporate somewhere between the desk, the racking and the lorry cab. Anything physical gets connected by whoever is already there: someone from your team, or the dealer who supplied it. Settings, enrolment and the link into your applications are our half of the work, done over remote access.
An order booked in Sage, Cegid or Odoo arrives in the warehouse application by itself; once picking closes, the status and the tracking reference travel back the other way. Whoever builds tomorrow's round then works from weights and pallet counts that are true this morning, not from a table pasted out of a spreadsheet at nine last night.
Colissimo, Chronopost, Mondial Relay, Colis Privé, DPD and GLS gathered behind one screen: a label produced where the parcel is wrapped, a collection booked, tracking pushed out to the customer, a return prepared without anybody emailing support. Which carrier gets the job can follow your own rules on weight, destination and promised date.
Consignment notes and delivery notes built out of the order record, exchanges with retail chains that oblige their suppliers to use EDI, and the figures behind goods movement declarations pulled from that same record. On the billing side we get you ready for the Factur-X format and for filing through an accredited e-invoicing platform.
Downloads from tachographs and from driver cards land in an online vault that is copied nightly and shared by name, instead of sitting in a directory on the traffic office machine. Handsets and tablets come under central management, through Intune for instance when that is part of your Microsoft 365 subscription: delivery proof, a photograph of the load, a signature from whoever receives it, and a remote wipe for the tablet somebody leaves at a motorway services.
We watch the depot network, the machines behind it and the data exchanges themselves; warehouse databases are copied away from the building; and a 4G link picks up the traffic on the morning a digger finds the fibre at the edge of the estate. Ransomware inside a freight office can freeze trading for a week, so every workstation carries modern endpoint protection and a second sign-in factor.
No depot can pause for a week while a link is rebuilt. Everything is assembled next to the process that is already running, and the cut-over lands on the calmest day we can find.
Over a video meeting we trace one order end to end, from the minute it lands to the signature that closes it, marking every point where a human being retypes a value.
Each exchange is assembled against carrier test accounts and a duplicate of your database. Not one trial label will ever find its way to a real address.
Production cut-over sits away from the despatch peak, typically a Saturday or at dawn ahead of the morning rush. Through the opening week your depot manager holds the engineer's direct line.
A message that fails to arrive sets off an alarm on our side rather than a phone call from an irritated customer. Every quarter we hunt down another manual step and delete it.
Silent faults are the expensive ones. A link that quietly stops passing orders into the warehouse raises no error message whatsoever. You find out when a customer chases something nobody ever picked. That is why our checks do not stop at whether a server answers: they follow real orders through each stage and raise a flag on the ones that never arrive.
Seldom. What hurts is usually not the software but the fact that it stands alone. Given an interface, a database that can be read under safe conditions, or even plain file exchange, it can be wired into your ERP and into the carriers. Replacement becomes the topic only when the vendor has stopped issuing fixes, because keeping it then turns into a security exposure.
Plugging the hardware in falls to your own people, often a bay supervisor, or to the dealer who sold it. Our side writes the configuration, enrols each unit for management, pushes drivers and label layouts, and stays on a video call while the first one is switched on. Nobody from Apply appears in your building, and nobody is left staring at an error on their own either.
Files taken from tachographs and driver cards must be retained for as long as the rules require and shown to an inspector on demand. Check the duration with your adviser or your payroll specialist and we set the retention to match. In practice the directory living on one manager's machine becomes a versioned online store, copied outside the depot, with rights granted person by person. Driving-time analysis software plugs into the same store.
None at all, because none of this work involves travelling anyway. Every site turns up in one monitoring console and shares a single request channel. You nominate a contact at each location, who becomes our pair of hands for the rare task that genuinely needs somebody standing beside the rack.
By dealing with them months early. We measure how many messages went through during your last peak, size the machine against that number, freeze anything non-urgent through the busy weeks, and agree stronger cover on the dates you call critical. Example: a food order-picking operation whose volume doubles in December runs its tests back in September, while there is still room to fix something.
We prepare the technical ground: invoices issued as Factur-X, a connection to an accredited platform, submission through Chorus Pro whenever your customer is a public buyer, and a tidy-up of customer references so invoices are not bounced back over a missing detail. Which obligations bite, and from when, is something to settle with your accountant.
Name the applications you depend on, the carriers you ship with, and the moment in the day when somebody starts retyping. Within one working day we answer with what we would connect first.
Message received
An answer follows inside one working day. Report an outage that is stopping people working and it moves ahead of everything else.
Nothing here under that name. Check the spelling, or simply choose the nearest large city instead. Since every engagement runs remotely, whichever you pick changes nothing about what we do for you.
