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Northwind Scheduler
Dispatch and rostering for 400 field technicians, rebuilt around a single drag-and-drop week view. Scheduling time dropped from hours to minutes per depot.
01 — Overview
The whiteboard, digitized
Dispatchers ran each depot from a wall whiteboard and a group chat. Our job was not to add features — it was to earn the whiteboard's trust, cell by cell.
We shadowed three depots for a week, then designed a week view dense enough to replace the wall and forgiving enough to survive a 6am shift change.
02 — Approach
What the engagement covered
- A week of depot shadowing across three sites, mapped into 40 real scheduling tasks.
- A week-view prototype tested with dispatchers on their own live rosters.
- Conflict warnings that explain themselves: who, when, and one-tap fixes.
- Offline-tolerant states for depots with patchy warehouse wifi.
- Training cards embedded in the UI so rollout needed zero workshops.
03 — Outcome
Minutes, not mornings
Average weekly scheduling time per depot fell from 3.5 hours to under 25 minutes. Double-bookings dropped by 90% in the first quarter after launch.
The whiteboards are still on the walls. They are just decorative now.
04 — Related work
Keep exploring
Atlas Travel Planner — another calendar-shaped problem, solved for travellers.
Loom Design System — the component library that grew out of this project.
Your turn
Running ops on whiteboards?
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