Logistics and Transportation App Development

Where Tepia fits in a logistics technology stack

Most carriers and brokers already own a transportation management system. The TMS is good at loads, rates and settlements and poor at the edges: the driver standing at a dock with a bill of lading, the shipper who wants status without calling, the dispatcher juggling three spreadsheets that the TMS does not cover. Tepia builds the apps that live at those edges and connect back to the TMS you keep.

Tepia’s logistics work covers regional carriers, freight brokers, 3PLs, private fleets for distributors and manufacturers, and shippers who need visibility from several carriers at once. The common thread is that the operation has outgrown phone calls and email as its integration layer.

If your operation is delivery to end customers rather than freight, see custom delivery app development.

Integration map: what Tepia connects and how

Logistics apps are integration projects with a mobile front end.

Tepia builds integrations through a middleware layer rather than point to point connections from the app, so a TMS change or an ELD provider switch is a single adapter rewrite rather than a rebuild. The systems integration services page describes this pattern in depth.

Driver app: load tracking, documents and compliance

The driver app Tepia builds is deliberately narrow. Drivers need the next stop, the paperwork for it, and a way to report what happened. Everything else is noise that gets the app deleted.

• Load and stop view. Assigned loads with pickup and delivery stops, appointment windows, reference numbers, and dock or gate instructions. Status updates (arrived, loaded, departed, delivered) with one tap, geofence assisted.
• Document capture. Bill of lading, proof of delivery, lumper receipts, scale tickets and damage photos scanned with the phone camera, cropped and attached to the load. Documents sync to the TMS and to object storage with a retention policy.
• Hours of service awareness. Tepia does not build an ELD. The driver app reads hours of service status from your ELD provider and uses it to warn dispatch when a load assignment would not fit the driver’s remaining hours. The ELD stays the system of record for compliance.
• Messaging and exceptions. Structured messages for detention, breakdown, rejected freight and reschedule requests, each creating a task for dispatch rather than a text in someone’s phone.
• Offline first. Stops and documents complete without signal and sync later, which matters at rural docks and inside warehouses.

Tepia builds the driver app natively in Swift and Kotlin or in React Native depending on the device policy and camera needs identified in discovery. Company owned Android devices with MDM are common in this category and push Tepia toward native Android.

Shipper portal and operations dashboard

The shipper portal is where a custom build pays for itself commercially. Shippers who can see load status, documents and invoices without calling are shippers who stay.

Exception driven views keep the team working on problems rather than scrolling through healthy loads.

Access control is role based from the start. A shipper sees only their loads, a carrier partner sees only tendered loads, and your staff see everything with audit logs on changes. Tepia applies SOC 2 aligned practices to logging, access review and data handling, which is increasingly a requirement from enterprise shippers.

How Tepia approaches logistics and transportation app development

Tepia’s six phase process applies to every logistics build, with extra weight on discovery because of the integration surface.

1. Discovery (typically 1 to 3 months). Tepia investigates your TMS, ELD, accounting and EDI setup, interviews dispatchers, drivers and two or three shippers, and documents every data flow. Deliverables: Investigation Summary, Interview Summary, User Stories and an integration map.
2. Design. Design questionnaire, moodboards and a style guide, then detailed wireframes for the driver stop flow, shipper portal and operations dashboard, and sample designs reviewed with drivers.
3. Development and Testing (typically 2 to 6 months). Alpha and Beta schedules with functional, user acceptance and nonfunctional test plans, including integration tests against TMS and ELD sandboxes and a live pilot on a subset of lanes.
4. Training. In person or remote sessions for dispatch and driver leads using user story scenarios such as a detention claim and a rejected load.
5. Launch (about 1 month). Migration of shipper accounts and open loads, transition from the old process by terminal or region, and Tepia support reps during rollout.

The full process is described at tepia.co/process, and examples of operational products are at our work.

Frequently asked questions