The Most Expensive Algorithm in the Building
James Findlay, CEO of Axel Intelligence
Most companies think they've automated, and to some technical degree, upgraded their dispatch operations. They bought the routing software — tens of thousands a year — and the driver’s routes and the customer sequencing come out optimized every morning. The modernization box is checked.
But existing orchestration engines only solve the problems that hold still: the 5 a.m. plan, when every variable is known and nothing has gone wrong yet.
The moment a driver calls in sick, a customer moves a window, or unexpected road closure clogs traffic, the plan is gone. The software hands the decision straight back to a person. The automation stops exactly where the hard part begins.
From mid-morning on, the operation isn't run by the algorithm the company paid for, it’s monitored by it - at best. The logistical replanning is run by whoever knows the network best, usually a dispatcher.
The dispatcher knows which customer will wait, which reefer runs warm, which driver to trust with the salvage run. None of it is written down. It lives in one head, recalled hundreds of times a day, under pressure.
When we asked around 100 Northeast delivery operators how long passes between a disruption and their first corrective action, the typical answer was about ten minutes. Ten minutes of firefighting, repeatedly, all day. That's ten minutes the dispatcher isn't spending on the thing they're good at: making the whole operation run efficiently.
The company is already paying to optimize dispatch. It's just paying for the half that was never the problem. The plan was easy. The recovery is still fully manual – live, dynamic high-stakes decisions persistently eating the time of the one person best placed to improve the operation.
We think the industry automated the wrong half of the job. The plan was never the hard part. The next generation of logistics software won't just hand the day back to the dispatcher when things go wrong — it will take the firefighting off their plate, so their judgment goes to making the operation better, not just keeping it alive.