HomeCase StudiesThe dispatch report that writes itself
Logistics company · 70 people

The 6 a.m. dispatch report writes itself now.

At a 70-person logistics company, a coordinator started at 5:30 a.m. to pull shipment data from the ERP, reconcile it against SharePoint trackers and email the daily dispatch report before drivers rolled out. A scheduled Power Automate flow does the whole job now — while everyone sleeps.

10 hrssaved / week
6 a.m.report, zero human effort
2systems kept in sync
The problem

The day started at 5:30 a.m. — with copy and paste.

Nothing moved until the dispatch report went out. Depot managers ran their mornings off it, and drivers rolled out on the back of it — which meant it had to exist before most of the company was awake. Producing it was one coordinator's job, and that job started at 5:30 a.m., every working day.

The routine itself was pure relay work. Shipment data lived in the ERP; the depots kept their own trackers in SharePoint; and the two didn't always agree. So the coordinator pulled the shipment data out of the ERP, lined it up against the SharePoint trackers, chased down the rows that didn't match, then formatted the result and emailed it out before drivers rolled out. None of the information was new — every line already existed in one system or the other. The entire job was reconciling two sources by hand, at an hour when nobody else was there to help.

It was also a single point of failure on a daily deadline. The process lived in one person's head and one person's early morning: a sick day, a holiday or a slow export put the report — and the whole morning that depended on it — at risk. And because the deadline was set by when drivers leave, there was no slack to absorb a bad day. The company wasn't short of data; it was spending a person's mornings moving it between two systems that should have been talking to each other.

What we did

One overnight flow — and a watchdog for late loads.

We rebuilt the coordinator's morning as a scheduled Power Automate flow that runs while the depot is dark, plus an escalation flow that watches loads against their SLA. Same report, same deadline — no human in the loop.

1
ERP to SharePoint, synced overnight

A scheduled flow pulls shipment data from the ERP and syncs it into SharePoint overnight, so both systems start the day telling the same story. The reconciliation that used to happen at a desk at 5:30 a.m. now happens while the building is empty.

2
Mismatches flagged, not hand-chased

Where the ERP and the SharePoint trackers disagree, the flow doesn't guess. It flags the mismatched records for review — so a human decision is only needed on the exceptions, not on every row of the report.

3
The 6 a.m. report, untouched

The flow formats the dispatch report and sends it to depot managers at 6 a.m. — the same report the coordinator used to assemble by hand, landing on schedule with zero human effort, every day drivers roll out.

4
SLA escalation for late loads

A separate escalation flow watches for loads running late against their SLA and raises them automatically — so a slipping delivery gets surfaced to the people who can act on it, instead of being discovered after the fact.

Results

What changed.

No vanity metrics — these are the three numbers the engagement was measured on.

10 hrssaved / week
6 a.m.report, zero human effort
2systems kept in sync
Built with
Power Automate SharePoint Online SharePoint lists Outlook Microsoft 365

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