Logistics & Last-Mile Distribution
Sensor-integrated dispatch, real-time weight loops, and settlement at the point of delivery.
In heavy logistics, most margin leakage happens between the loading bay and the invoice. Colony collapses that gap with sensor-integrated dispatch, digital weight loops, and micro-payment settlement — releasing working capital and slashing dispute overhead.
The dispatch-to-cash cycle is the hidden killer.
A £30m turnover logistics business will typically lose 2–3% of top-line revenue to catch-weight disputes, credit-note attrition, and administrative time spent chasing paper run sheets. Days Sales Outstanding drift past forty-five days on distribution accounts, tying up working capital that could otherwise fund the fleet. Ops managers spend more time triaging disputes than optimising routes.
Signals it is you
Net margin below 3% despite double-digit revenue growth
Days Sales Outstanding consistently above 45 days
More than 2% of invoiced value ending up in disputed or written-off credit notes
Multiple daily disputes under £150 that cost more to process than to concede
Weight, dispatch, and settlement collapsed into a single closed loop.
We instrument the entire dispatch path — from crane and pallet scales on the loading bay, through the driver's mobile app, into the customer's receiving dock — so that the physical weight of goods and the invoiced amount are reconciled in real time, at the point of transfer, with the customer's signature.
Components
Component · 01
Bluetooth-linked scales
Retrofit BLE modules on existing crane and pallet scales — no rip-and-replace.
Component · 02
Colony Weight-Loop API
Proprietary, ERP-agnostic layer reconciling weight-at-dispatch with invoice-at-delivery in under 100ms.
Component · 03
Driver app
React Native, offline-first. Dispatch, e-signature, photo capture, sync-on-connect.
Component · 04
QR micro-payment engine
PSD2-compliant settlement at the point of delivery for small-ticket disputes.
Component · 05
Dispute pre-clearance agent
Automatically settles under-£150 disputes without human intervention using per-account rules.
What lives under the hood.
Scale firmware
Custom BLE firmware layered on existing scale hardware — vendor-agnostic.
Weight-Loop core
Rust service with sub-100ms weight-to-invoice reconciliation.
ERP middleware
Pre-built connectors for SAP, Sage 200, and MS Dynamics 365 Business Central.
Payment gateway
PSD2 SCA handling with fallback flow for offline delivery scenarios.
Reported weekly. Reconciled quarterly.
Invoice disputes under £150 fall to zero within one billing cycle. DSO on distribution accounts drops from 45+ days to under 21. Working capital is released in a single working month. Administrative headcount is redeployed from dispute triage into commercial account management. The compounding effect on EBITDA is visible within two quarters and structural thereafter.
Annual EBITDA
+£260k
Working Capital
£2.7M released
DSO Reduction
−25 days
Disputes < £150
−100%
From diagnostic to measurable impact.
Phase · 01
Wk 0–2
Diagnostic, scale audit, ERP integration scoping.
Phase · 02
Wk 2–6
Firmware rollout, ERP middleware live, driver app pilot with lead depot.
Phase · 03
Wk 6–8
Full-fleet rollout, ops team training, first parallel-billing cycle.
Phase · 04
Wk 8–12
KPI stabilisation, dispute-agent tuning, second-order route optimisations.
Where else this travels well.
Every Colony playbook is engineered to be portable. The core intervention shape holds — components adapt to the client context.
Cold-chain distribution
Industrial wholesale
Waste & recycling logistics
Port drayage
Often deployed alongside this one.
Think this playbook fits your operation?
Three concise steps and a Colony operational specialist will respond within one working day with a bespoke margin-uplift projection scoped to your footprint.