Creating a modern, bespoke Transport Management System with a custom booking, tracking, and driver management system

Russell Logistics is a UK-based, time-critical logistics company focussing on freight movement in and around London’s busy Heathrow Airport. The business supports UK forwarders with same-day courier services, dedicated freight movements, airport collections, timed deliveries, and urgent cargo transport across the country. This includes London Heathrow air freight collections, as well as urgent aircraft parts, event logistics, car parts, ship spares, and time-sensitive deliveries such as animal transport.

This is the kind of setup where small inefficiencies matter greatly. Delayed proof of delivery, a missed update or unclear driver location can affect delivery performance, operational control, and customer satisfaction.

Russell Logistics initially came to First Option Software with an existing delivery management tool that did not properly reflect the way the business worked. Whilst it supported some core processes, it was based around a generic cookie-cutter platform, and didn’t handle urgent freight, self-employed drivers, customer paperwork, and rapid POD turnaround properly. Pressure was heightened by the realities of working in and around one of the world’s busiest airports.

As an urgent delivery and shipping business, it is vitally important that Russell Logistics knows which jobs are live, when drivers are available and where they are, what has been collected and delivered, and whether the correct proof has been properly captured and communicated with the customer.

The legacy system helped with aspects of this, but it didn’t truly reflect the way the company did business. One of the major factors was proof of delivery. Often using customer paperwork as POD evidence, Russell Logistics relied on its drivers capturing photographs of that paperwork, and returning it quickly. The previous platform allowed POD uploads, but didn’t properly support multiple PODs across multiple jobs within a single delivery. In practice, this meant company directors were often staying up past midnight to receive WhatsApp messages with photos of proof of delivery, copying those photos into emails, and then sending them on to clients in order to meet a 30-minute POD SLA.

This meant critical customer promises were dependent on manual chasing, out-of-hours work, and individual follow-up. First Option helped Russell Logistics move towards a driver-led, more automated process, where drivers could capture and submit PODs from the road, and the system could handle the rest consistently and simply.

On top of this, when working with self-employed owner-drivers, allocation and rate-setting were very difficult. Custom job rates were complicated to set before allocation, which created extra manual load later on.

Driver notifications were another hurdle, with back office regularly having to call drivers to ask them to accept a job by phone.

Russell Logistics required a system that could:

• Manage urgent delivery through a centralised portal
• Support self-employed owner-driver workflows
• Create, assign, and track jobs efficiently
• Capture PODs, photos, and signatures from the road
• Support multiple PODs and customer-specific requirements
• Give back office real-time visibility of driver locations
• Improve job notifications and reduce manual load
• Keep job history intact and traceable

The mission was not to simply copy the previous platform, but instead to rebuild the workflow around the way the business actually runs day to day.

First Option began by visiting Russell Logistics on site to better understand the operation. This was crucial because logistics cannot be designed and run from a distance; it’s the smaller details that make the difference. This meant understanding how bookings were created, how drivers were notified, how collections and deliveries were made and recorded, and how PODs were captured. Finally, this needed to be combined with the way managers worked and what live information they needed to see.

The initial priority was to move from the old application and onto a modern, web-based portal. This required careful handling, due to the mission-critical operational data in the existing system, with the old and new systems running in parallel for a transition period.

The admin portal gives the office team a central place to manage jobs, customers, drivers, deliveries, and operational data. They can create bookings and allocations, track progress, and manage key data to keep deliveries moving.

The driver app then supports the work happening on the ground. Due to working with self-employed owner-drivers, First Option created a system which could work with the drivers’ own phones, distributed through the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store. The app allows drivers to manage assignments, update statuses, capture POD information such as signatures and photos, and confirm delivery stages. This is particularly crucial where customers rely on PODs quickly after delivery. 

This combination means drivers can now record progress as it happens, without the need for office staff to manually gather and chase information.

Using location services from the mobile apps, the new platform gives Russell Logistics real-time visibility of driver locations. In the office, this is viewed on large, intuitive dashboards, giving the team immediate oversight of what’s happening, as it happens.

This in turn supports better allocation. When a new collection comes in, the team can see which drivers are nearby, and assign the job accordingly, reducing the reliance on phone calls and guesswork.

The tracking functionality also shows historical routes, so the business can review routes taken and provide evidence when needed.

Key improvements include automatically creating collection and delivery entries, improved address book management, recent locations, postcode lookup, and both typed and picker-based date and time entry.

The system also allows for block bookings, allowing jobs to be repeated across specified dates, while still creating individually editable bookings. 

Other improvements include bulk printing, clear delivery deadline indications, better visibility of vehicle type and better control over changes made after allocation. These are the critical tools that run behind the scenes, reducing clicks, minimising admin, and helping staff work more efficiently through busy periods.

Customer communication is now improved through email templates, booking confirmations and POD notifications. With customer-level settings, Russell Logistics can also toggle specific update emails where necessary.

When it came to invoicing, the previous system created a lot of manual workload. Updates included Sage integration and financial workflow improvements.

The platform itself was built with Angular on the front end, and Directus as the backend. Directus is a headless CMS with built-in APIs. This approach helped support the initial transition phase, where First Option delivered the driver app first, while the app continued to run from the existing system through a direct database integration. 

This gave Russell Logistics the functionality and tools they needed most, in the quickest possible way. They could retain continuity while First Option developed the rest of the system, ready for the business to switch over fully.

A continuous integration and deployment process was also created, allowing changes to be deployed to staging for internal review. The driver app supports over-the-air updates through First Option’s systems, which reduces delays from app store review processes. This is hugely beneficial for a live logistics platform that needs to be reliable but adaptable.