The ops team finds out a shipment is stuck when the customer calls to ask why.

The situation

All the data, none of the attention

The TMS shows every shipment's last tracking event. The problem is arithmetic: 2,000 shipments, a dozen ops staff, and no rule for which rows deserve eyes. The team works the queue that shouts loudest — inbound calls and emails — which means the customer discovers the stalled shipment before the operator does, every time. The apology call is always harder than the proactive one would have been.

Disputes age the same way. Damage and shortage claims sit in a shared inbox and a spreadsheet; each has a carrier deadline, and a claim that misses its filing window is money forfeited. Nobody tracks time-remaining per claim, so the urgent ones surface by accident or not at all.

Carrier drift is the slowest leak: a carrier's on-time rate on one lane degrades over weeks. Any single late shipment looks like noise; the pattern only exists in aggregate, and nobody aggregates — so the quarterly carrier review argues from anecdotes.

The work

What Taz builds for this operator

Taz builds a daily pulse from the TMS and carrier exports the operator already has: written exception rules, a dispute aging tracker, and carrier scorecards — reviewed by the ops lead each morning.

• Stuck-shipment rules: Written, per-service-level definitions of "stalled" — no tracking event for N hours by mode, missed ETA by margin, or a customs hold exceeding its norm — so the flag list is a policy the ops lead controls, not a black box.
• Dispute aging tracker: Every open claim gets a structured record: carrier, amount, filing deadline, days silent, next action owner. The digest leads with claims nearing their window — the ones that turn into forfeited money.
• Carrier scorecards: Weekly per-carrier, per-lane on-time and damage rates from the same tracking data, so drift becomes a visible trend line and the quarterly carrier conversation starts from numbers.
• Customer-impact ranking: Exceptions are ordered by account importance and promised delivery dates the operator's own rules define — the digest's top ten items are the ten worth a proactive call this morning.
• The daily digest: One document by 7am: shipments needing intervention with their evidence, disputes nearing deadlines, and the week's carrier drift — every line traceable to source data.

The deliverable

What the operator receives

• Working pulse pipeline — TMS and carrier-export ingestion through daily digest, running on real shipment data, with operating instructions.
• Exception rulebook — the stall definitions, deadline thresholds, and ranking rules as a written document the ops lead amends as the network changes.
• Dispute tracker — the structured claim register with deadline arithmetic, populated with current open claims during the engagement.
• Carrier scorecard templates — per-carrier, per-lane weekly views, with two weeks of live history produced before handover.
• Operating guide — who reviews the digest, escalation paths, and the boundary list: what the pulse watches, and what it never sends.