Case study · European road transport, live animals
We did not replace the spreadsheet. We turned it into the company's operating system.
Koekkoek Int. Horse Transport B.V. · B.V. · Netherlands · koekkoekinthorsetransport.nl
This is not an application. It is a platform: native apps on iPhone and Android, desktop builds for Mac and Windows, installable web apps, and browser panels, each shaped for the person using it and all reading the same records. The office plans. Drivers work from a phone at a border at six in the morning. Clients book and follow their horses. Someone at the barn checks an animal in. Two partner companies abroad see their slice.
Dispatch · today
liveplanning · dispatch · invoicing
One platform, delivered as
- iOS native
- Android native
- macOS desktop
- Windows desktop
- Installable PWA
- Web panels
- Delivered as
- Native, desktop, PWA, web
- Used by
- Office, drivers, clients, partners
- Data
- Held in the EU
- Built in
- 15 months, one architect
Before
The spreadsheet was not the problem. It was the evidence.
A transport company of this size runs on a planning spreadsheet, a stack of paper, a phone, and the memory of whoever has been there longest. That is not incompetence. It is what happens when no software on the market matches the work, so people build the missing system themselves out of whatever is to hand.
The planners' sheet encoded real knowledge: which rows were the outbound run and which the way back, which jobs still needed something, expressed in colour and shorthand everyone in the office understood and no software did.
The usual answer is to declare the spreadsheet obsolete and make everyone learn a new system. That throws away the one thing that was working, and it is why so many of these projects are quietly abandoned six months after go-live.
We began the other way round, inside the operation: on the dispatch desk, in the office, alongside the drivers, learning how the work actually moves before deciding what to build.
What was built
One platform, five connected systems, every device.
The smart spreadsheet
The planners' Excel sheet, rebuilt as a live part of the platform. Several people editing at once, the same colours and shorthand they always used, and every row now connected to a real order rather than sitting in a file on someone's desktop.
Ordering
Transport orders from clients, agents and the office, in one book, with the horses, locations and documents that belong to each one.
Planning
Journeys assembled from those orders, outbound and return legs, corridors across Europe, trucks, trailers and drivers assigned against them.
Dispatch
What is moving today, who is driving it, which horses are aboard and what still has to happen before it leaves.
Invoicing
The financial side attached to the movement that produced it, so what was transported and what was billed are the same record rather than two accounts to reconcile.
Stays and the barn
Horses arriving, stabled and departing, with the building itself drawn in three dimensions and check-in handled at the yard rather than at a desk.
Apps for the people doing the work
Drivers get a native phone app built for a border crossing at six in the morning. The office gets desktop and web. Clients get their own portal. Partners abroad get a controlled window. Same records underneath all of it.
Regulatory records
Movement certification, veterinary and health documents, customs and export dossiers, kept with the transport they belong to instead of in a separate folder nobody updates.
The hard part
The spreadsheet became the front door to everything else.
Keeping the sheet was the easy half of the decision. The hard half was wiring it into the rest of the company, so that a row is not a note about work, it is the work.
A line on that grid now reaches an order, a planned journey, a dispatched truck and an invoice. Change it in one place and the operation moves with it. That is the difference between a spreadsheet the software tolerates and a spreadsheet the software runs on.
Several people edit it at the same time and their changes merge properly rather than the last person to save winning. That is genuinely difficult to get right, and it holds up under the load of a working dispatch desk where everyone is in the sheet at once on a Monday morning.
On top sits a planning agent that reads a hand-arranged block of rows and proposes a structured journey from it. The parts that must be exact are decided by rules, not by a model: which rows are the return leg, which jobs are unfinished, read from the colours and shorthand the office already uses. And it never writes anything by itself. It proposes, a person applies, and only then does a journey exist.
The same restraint governs document reading. Passports and orders are read by machine, the interface shows where the machine was unsure, and a person confirms before anything becomes a record.
None of it could interrupt trading. The company moved horses every day this was built, so every change had to apply itself safely to a live system, and nothing ships unless the whole platform passes its checks first. A broken release means a driver at a border with no paperwork.
Where it stands
One platform now runs the operation end to end, delivered as native iPhone and Android apps, desktop builds for Mac and Windows, installable web apps and browser panels, each shaped for the person using it.
Security is structural rather than bolted on. Staff sign in with passkeys and biometrics instead of passwords, the mobile apps verify they are genuine before they are trusted, sessions are bound to the device that created them and refuse to work if that check fails, access is separated into four levels, and every action is written to an append-only trail that would rather fall back to the server log than lose an entry. The native apps pin their connection so it cannot be silently intercepted, even on a hostile network at a border. The platform has been through a formal security audit with a tracked remediation list.
All data is held inside the EU, which for a company moving animals across European borders under European regulation is not a preference but a requirement.
There is one accessibility detail worth naming because it says what kind of system this is: a colour-blindness mode that swaps red and green for blue and vermillion, so staff who cannot rely on colour can still tell completed from cancelled, or invoiced from not.
Fifteen months and roughly 300,000 lines, built and maintained by one architect, while the company never stopped running.
What a request passes through
Platform & engineering
- Native iOS (Swift)
- Native Android (Kotlin, Java)
- Cross-platform desktop (Flutter)
- Progressive web applications
- PostgreSQL with read replicas
- Caching and background queues
- Real-time collaborative editing
- wAI operation engine
- Passkeys and device attestation
- EU-hosted infrastructure
More work
Intercontinental equine air transport
Horse E.T. B.V.
A platform that understands the horse before the journey is planned.
Horse transport, Morocco corridor
Med&Ark Services SARL
A sister company given exactly the slice of the parent's data it needs.
Shared operations layer
Lorys B.V.
The neutral layer letting a road company and an air company work as one.
Start here
Your operation is different. That is the point.
Every system here was built around how one company actually works. Tell us how yours runs and we will tell you what it would take.