Two Weeks for a Truck Utilization System

Two Weeks for a Truck Utilization System – Delivered by BuildClub Professional Services

Client Background

A regional route collection operator was facing a stubborn, expensive problem: their trucks were showing up at landfills and transfer stations either half empty or overloaded. Dispatchers were making decisions on gut feel. Supervisors were firefighting. The fleet was getting beat up by overweight runs, and management was seriously considering buying more trucks “to be safe.”

The painful part?
All the data to answer the question “Are we using our trucks efficiently?” already existed in their systems. Nobody could get at it in a way that was useful for daily operations.

That’s where BuildClub Professional Services came in.

The Problem

The client had:

• A commercial route / scale-house system
  
• Raw load and scale data living on an internal server
  
• A set of canned reports designed for billing and compliance—not for capacity utilization or route optimization
  

When they asked their software vendor for a simple utilization report—

“Show us, by route and truck, how full we are when we hit the landfill, and when we’re getting there”

— the answer was:

“No, our system doesn’t support that.”

They tried to solve it themselves:

• Excel: Too manual and fragile for daily reporting
  
• Power Automate: Licensing costs and complexity piled up fast
  
• Power BI & industry SaaS: Rigid templates, built for someone else’s workflow
  

Nothing gave supervisors a clear, daily view of:

• Underutilized trucks
  
• Overweight runs
  
• Badly timed arrivals
  

So the team lived with it. Over time, this turned into:

• Chronic under- or over-loaded trucks
  
• Increased wear and maintenance risk
  
• Justification for a new $1M truck purchase that “felt” necessary
  

They brought in BuildClub Professional Services to break the stalemate.

Why the Client Engaged BuildClub

The client wasn’t looking for yet another platform rollout. They needed:

1. A concrete, working solution: a daily report operations could actually use.
   
2. Fast turnaround: weeks, not quarters.
   
3. Capability transfer: the ability to maintain and adjust the system themselves, without becoming dependent on BuildClub or the original vendor.
   

BuildClub Professional Services was brought in specifically because we:

• Work comfortably with messy operational data from legacy systems
  
• Use modern AI tools (ChatGPT, Claude, Cursor) to accelerate discovery and build
  
• Design implementations so that non-developer operations teams can own them after go-live
  

BuildClub’s Approach

1. Rapid Data Discovery

The first obstacle wasn’t analytics; it was finding and understanding the data.

In the initial working session, a BuildClub engineer sat down with the client’s ops lead and:

• Located the scale-house database on the internal server
  
• Identified the key tables holding:
  
  • Truck IDs and capacities
    
  • Load tickets (gross, tare, net weights)
    
  • Timestamps and facility information
    
• Mapped how loads related to routes and shifts
  

We used AI coding assistants as accelerators here, not magical black boxes:

• To generate connection code and quick SQL to list tables
  
• To propose joins and transformations
  
• To help reverse-engineer poorly documented schemas
  

But every assumption was validated with the client’s team: “Does this column actually match the truck numbers you use in the yard?” “Does this timestamp align with your arrival at the scale?”

This discovery work—traditionally a multi-week archaeology dig—was compressed into hours.

2. Designing the “One-Page Truth” for Operations

Before writing real code, we aligned on the outcome:

A single, daily PDF report that answers:

For each route and truck yesterday:

• How full was it when it hit the landfill/transfer station?
  
• When did it arrive?
  
• Was it underloaded, in the sweet spot, or overweight?
  

We mocked up a simple visual:

• Y-axis: Routes
  
• X-axis: Time
  
• Bars: Trips to the landfill/transfer stations
  
• Color: Utilization
  
  
  • Green: within target band (e.g., 70–90% of capacity)
    
  • Yellow: underutilized
    
  • Red: overweight
    

This became the contract: if the report looked like this and populated every morning with fresh data, supervisors would have what they needed.

3. The Build: Two Weeks to a Working System

Using that visual spec, BuildClub Professional Services built the system in essentially one focused working block.

Core elements:

1. Data Access Script
   
   • Connects securely to the scale-house database
     
   • Queries the prior day’s loads and route data
     
   • Normalizes timestamps, weights, and truck IDs
     
     
2. Utilization Logic
   
   • Calculates net weight for each load
     
   • Applies truck capacity to compute utilization percentage
     
   • Flags:
     
     • Underutilized loads (below threshold)
       
     • Overweight loads (above threshold)
       
   • Groups by route, truck, and day to derive summary stats
     
     
3. Visualization & Report Generation
   
   • Renders the route-time chart with color-coded bars
     
   • Adds summary tables:
     
     • Top underutilized routes
       
     • Worst overweight offenders
       
   • Exports to a clean, operator-friendly PDF
     
     
4. Automation & Distribution
   
   • Installed on a standard office PC—no new infrastructure
     
   • Scheduled to run autonomously at 4:00 a.m.
     
   • Saves the PDF to a shared location
     
   • Emails the report automatically to supervisors and dispatch
     

The AI tools handled a lot of the heavy lifting around boilerplate code, SQL generation, and formatting. BuildClub engineers focused on:

• Getting the business rules right
  
• Making sure the report matched reality
  
• Keeping the system boring and maintainable
  

Knowledge Transfer: Making the Client Self-Sufficient

From the start, this wasn’t intended to be a mysterious script only BuildClub could touch.

As part of the engagement, we:

• Walked the client’s team through the codebase line by line
  
  • Explained how data was pulled, transformed, and visualized
    
• Documented configuration points
  
  • Where to change thresholds (under/overutilization)
    
  • How to add new trucks or adjust capacities
    
  • How to tweak scheduling or email recipients
    
• Provided a simple runbook
  
  • “If it fails, here’s where to look and what to check”
    
• Set them up in an AI-assisted IDE
  
  • So they could safely use ChatGPT/Claude for future tweaks without breaking core logic
    

By the end, supervisors weren’t just using the report—they understood enough to request and implement small changes internally.

Impact

The results were immediate and measurable.

1. Build Time & Cost

• Initial working system stood up in ~1 week.
  
• A few short follow-up iterations to refine visuals and edge cases.
  
• No new hardware, no new enterprise software, no long vendor cycle.
  

2. Labor Savings

Before BuildClub, answering “How full were we yesterday?” meant:

• Exporting CSVs
  
• Massaging data in Excel
  
• Manually building ad-hoc charts
  

The automated report eliminated this daily grind, saving the equivalent of over two full-time roles worth of manual effort and distraction.

3. Capital Avoidance

The utilization report surfaced the uncomfortable truth:

• Several routes that felt “maxed out” were actually fine
  
• Others were quietly running half-empty day after day
  
• Some trucks were chronically overloaded and beating themselves to death
  

By rebalancing and tightening the target utilization band, the client:

• Unlocked enough effective capacity in the existing fleet
  
• Walked back a planned ~$1M truck purchase that was no longer necessary
  

4. Operational Control

Supervisors now start the day with a single, trusted view:

• Which routes need attention
  
• Which trucks are consistently underperforming or overloaded
  
• How arrival times line up against expectations
  

They adjust routes before problems show up—not after angry calls, broken trucks, or blown shifts.

What This Says About BuildClub

This project wasn’t about selling a platform. It was about:

• Taking a specific operational pain point
  
• Using the client’s existing data and systems
  
• Applying AI-accelerated development where it actually helps
  
• Delivering a working solution in days, not quarters
  
• Leaving the client with the skills and confidence to run and evolve it themselves
  

BuildClub Professional Services exists for exactly this kind of work:

• Narrow, high-impact problems
  
• Messy, underused data
  
• Teams who know the work but don’t yet know how to turn their ideas into tools
  

If your organization is living with “everyone knows this is broken, but the vendor says no,” this is the playbook. BuildClub won’t just build it for you—we’ll build it with you so your team can own it going forward.