Scaling CT Freight's Operations with the Horizon App: A Success Story

In just four months, the Horizon app cut manual coordination by 70%, automated compliance reporting, and gave CT Freight the capacity to absorb a year’s growth without a single additional hire.

Learn How We Built the Horizon App

Scaling CT Freight's Operations with the Horizon App: A Success Story

Meet CT Freight

When a shipment is late, it causes more than just an inconvenience. It can result in a failed compliance check, a rejected consignment, or a client relationship that never recovers.

CT Freight had built a strong reputation with a growing client base and multiple warehouse sites across the country. Their team took genuine pride in getting the details that matter right, every single day.

But the freight industry was changing:

Clients expected real-time visibility.
Compliance requirements were tightening.
Competitors were investing in technology that made manual processes look like a liability.

CT Freight had the people and the reputation. What they needed now was the operational infrastructure to match.

When success starts working against you

CT Freight was growing faster than anyone expected. More clients, more shipments, more sites. The team was working harder than ever, but the systems beneath them had never been built to carry this much weight.

No shared truth across sites

The team was working harder than ever, but the systems beneath them had never been built to carry this much weight. Updates lived in isolated WhatsApp threads, shared folders, and paper pick lists.

Every shipment was a small investigation

Finding the current status of a shipment meant calling someone, checking a spreadsheet, or hunting through a folder. Nothing was where you expected it to be.

Compliance reports took hours, every time

Documentation had to be assembled manually for every compliance event. Two to three hours of work, using information that already existed somewhere in the business, just never in one place.

Growth was making everything harder, not easier

Each new client, each new site added more data, more handoffs, and more places for things to fall through the cracks. Scaling the operation meant scaling the chaos.

I dreaded Monday mornings. We never knew what was waiting for us.

The operation wasn't broken. It was outgrowing itself. Eventually, they'd face a choice between slowing down or turning away business.

They almost didn't go ahead

CT Freight had looked at software solutions before. They’d been offered solutions that promised to fix everything, but what they got was a platform the warehouse team barely recognised as their own operation. Their doubts going into the project weren't irrational; they were earned.

What if the system doesn't reflect how our warehouses actually operate?
What if building this disrupts operations while we're already stretched to capacity?
What if the project grows beyond the original scope — and we end up paying for something we never agreed to?

These weren't doubts about technology. They were doubts born from experience — from watching other solutions fail to survive contact with real work. What CT Freight needed wasn't just a build partner. They needed a team willing to walk into the warehouse before opening a design file.

Three moments that built trust

CT Freight had looked at other options. What set EB Pearls apart was the quality of engagement from the very first conversation.

They found a problem we didn't know we had

During discovery, the team identified a dispatch handoff gap that wasn't in the original brief. They fixed it without raising a change request. That one decision told us more about how they work than any proposal could have.

Every decision was explained before it was made

When trade-offs came up, the team walked CT Freight through the reasoning first. No black-box decisions. No surprises at handover. We always knew exactly where we stood and why.

We saw our own operation in the prototype

Three weeks in, CT Freight saw their actual warehouse workflows reflected in a working prototype. That was the moment the team stopped wondering if it was going to work — and started planning for when it launched.

The design started with the reality of the warehouse floor

Before a single screen was designed, the EB Pearls team spent time inside CT Freight's warehouses. Watching how shipments moved. Where information changed hands. Where the gaps were opening up.

Everyone had assumed the problem was visibility — that CT Freight needed a better dashboard, something to show where things were in real time. What the team found was something different.

Every shipment generated data, from QC photos to compliance documents and dispatch records. The problem wasn’t missing data. It was disconnected data.

Photos sat in shared drives with no link to the right shipment. IDs were copied manually into multiple systems. Dispatch teams waited on documents that already existed, just in the wrong place.

The insight was simple: fix the connections, and the visibility problem solves itself.

“Most vendors showed us what their software could do. EB Pearls tried to understand how we actually worked.”

— Operations Manager, CT Freight

Built around the customer, not the software

The result was the Horizon Platform: a custom operations system designed specifically around how CT Freight's warehouses actually run.

Mobile App

Capture shipment data and QC photos directly on the warehouse floor. Flutter was chosen for cross-platform deployment across Android devices — one codebase, every site, no delays between OS updates.

Backend & APIs

One unified record for every shipment — all data connected, all teams in sync. Node.js handles real-time API processing so shipment updates propagate across sites the moment they happen.

Operations Dashboard

Real-time visibility across all sites in a single interface. React's component architecture made it straightforward to build views tailored to each role — warehouse floor, dispatch, management — without duplicating logic.

Automated Reporting

Compliance documents generated directly from operational data — no manual assembly. MongoDB's flexible document model handles the varied data structures across shipment types and compliance templates without forcing a rigid schema.

Single Shipment Record

QC photos, compliance docs, and dispatch data connected in one place per shipment. This was the structural fix the reframe demanded — not a better dashboard, but a single source of truth that every handoff could reference.

Offline-First Architecture

Works without signal. Syncs automatically when connectivity returns. This wasn't a nice-to-have — warehouse environments are patchy by nature, and any system that required a live connection would fail within the first week on the floor.

Technology used

Flutter

NodeJS

ReactJS

MongoDB

Flutter Bloc

GraphQL

AWS lambda

NextJS

SonarQube

Flutter

NodeJS

ReactJS

MongoDB

Flutter Bloc

GraphQL

AWS lambda

NextJS

SonarQube

Most platforms fail because they start with software. This one started with operations.

01 Studied real warehouse workflows before a single screen was designed - understanding how work actually moved, not how it was supposed to move.

02 Redesigned the dispatch handoffs that were causing the data fragmentation - the root cause, not the visible symptom.

03 Unified shipment records across every system, site and team - so the data that already existed could finally be found and used.

04 Built for real environments offline-first, floor-tested, and designed to work under the conditions that actually exist in a freight warehouse.

The before and after, in numbers

Once Horizon went live, CT Freight stopped firefighting and started scaling. The results came quickly — and kept compounding as volumes grew.

Metric	Before	After · EB Pearls
Manual work	Heavy cross-site coordination, every day	70% reducedScaled without headcount
Report time	2-3 hours per compliance event	80% fasterUnder 20 minutes

Technology stopped being the constraint; it became the engine.

Before

"I dreaded Monday mornings."

After

"Now I start the day checking the dashboard."

The 70% reduction in manual work was significant. But it wasn’t the number the team talked about most. What changed was predictability: the confidence that the operation was under control today, would still be under control next month, and could keep growing without things falling apart.

CT Freight now has a platform that grows with them. A team that can take on more without adding headcount and an operation that finally works for the business, not against it.

Your process isn't the problem.
Your app system is.

If your operations are outgrowing your systems, we'll start where Horizon started: on the warehouse floor.

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