A mid-sized industrial distributor based in South Africa, faced mounting inefficiencies in its last-mile delivery operations. With a growing fleet of delivery vehicles servicing customers across the greater Gauteng province, the company struggled with manual dispatch processes, poor route visibility, and an inability to provide reliable delivery estimates to customers. By integrating TomTom's Webfleet fleet management platform directly into their existing order management system, the company eliminated manual data entry, reduced dispatch errors, and gained real-time visibility over its delivery operations. This case study examines how the integration was designed, the business problems it solved, and how similar organisations can leverage fleet management API integrations to transform their delivery workflows.
The company operates a multi-branch distribution network supplying industrial components to customers in the plumbing, construction, and general industrial sectors. Their customer base spans urban centres and remote industrial sites, making reliable delivery logistics a critical component of their value proposition.
Orders are managed through a bespoke enterprise resource planning (ERP) system built on a modern web stack. The system handles the full order lifecycle from quotation through to invoicing, including inventory management, warehouse picking, quality checks, and dispatch. Prior to the integration, the delivery scheduling process was a disconnected, labour-intensive workflow that sat outside the digital order pipeline.
The company's delivery fleet covers various geographic zones across the province. Each zone is served by a dedicated vehicle and driver, with deliveries scheduled daily based on customer locations and order readiness.
Before the integration, the dispatch process worked as follows:
This process introduced several pain points. Manual data transcription was time-consuming and error-prone, with incorrect addresses or zone assignments leading to failed deliveries and wasted fuel. There was no link between the order management system and the fleet management platform, meaning the status of a delivery could not be tracked from within the ERP. Dispatch coordinators spent a disproportionate amount of their day on administrative data entry rather than on optimising routes and managing exceptions. During peak periods, the bottleneck at the dispatch desk created delays that rippled through the entire delivery schedule.
The company chose to build a direct integration between their ERP system and the Webfleet platform using TomTom's Webfleet Connect API. Rather than implementing a standalone middleware layer, the integration was embedded directly into the existing order management workflow, ensuring that dispatch became a seamless extension of the order lifecycle rather than a separate process.
The integration follows a gateway pattern, with a dedicated Webfleet gateway class encapsulating all communication with the external API. This design isolates the third-party dependency from the core application logic, making it straightforward to test, maintain, and extend.
All API requests include the company's Webfleet account identifier, ensuring that orders are routed to the correct fleet. The API responses are parsed as JSON, and any errors returned by the Webfleet platform are captured, logged with full context, and surfaced to the user as actionable error messages.
Configuration is managed through environment variables, allowing the development, staging, and production environments to connect to different Webfleet accounts without code changes. This separation proved particularly valuable during the rollout, as the team could test the full dispatch workflow against a sandbox account before going live.
The integration is woven into the existing order lifecycle at a natural handoff point. When an order progresses through the warehouse stages of picking and quality checking and reaches a releasable state, a "Schedule Delivery" action becomes available to the dispatch coordinator. This action is only enabled when the order meets all prerequisites: a valid delivery address with geocoded coordinates must be assigned, the order must be flagged for the driver delivery method, and the order must be in an appropriate status (released, picked, checked, or dispatched).
The scheduling interface presents the coordinator with a streamlined form displaying the confirmed delivery location, a date selector, a zone selector, and a vehicle assignment dropdown. The zone-to-vehicle mapping is preconfigured, ensuring that the correct vehicle is always assigned to the corresponding delivery zone. When the coordinator submits the form, the system performs two operations in a single transaction: it creates a delivery record in the local database for internal tracking, and it transmits the order to Webfleet using the "send and assign" API action. This action simultaneously creates the destination order in Webfleet and assigns it to the designated vehicle, so the driver receives it on their in-cab device immediately.
A notable technical consideration in the integration is the coordinate system conversion. The ERP system stores geographic coordinates in standard decimal degrees, while the Webfleet API expects coordinates in WGS84 micro-degrees (decimal degrees multiplied by one million). The gateway handles this conversion transparently, along with mapping internal order data to the Webfleet API's expected field structure. The order identifier, customer address components, delivery date, and vehicle code are all mapped from the internal data model to the external API format within the gateway layer, keeping the controller logic clean and focused on workflow orchestration.
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Book a free consultationThe most immediate impact was the removal of manual transcription from the dispatch process. Delivery details that were previously copied by hand from the order management screen to the Webfleet web interface are now transmitted programmatically with a single button click. This eliminated transcription errors entirely and reduced the time required to dispatch a single order from several minutes to seconds.
By enforcing prerequisite checks before the scheduling action becomes available, the system prevents common dispatch errors at the source. Orders cannot be sent to Webfleet without a geocoded delivery address, ensuring that drivers always receive valid navigation coordinates. The zone-to-vehicle mapping removes the possibility of assigning an order to the wrong vehicle, a mistake that previously resulted in cross-zone detours and delayed deliveries.
With delivery records stored in the ERP database alongside order data, coordinators and customer service staff can see at a glance whether an order has been dispatched, which vehicle it was assigned to, and the scheduled delivery date. This information is available directly on the order view screen, removing the need to switch between systems to answer customer enquiries about delivery status.
The streamlined dispatch process has meaningfully improved throughput during high-volume periods. Where the manual process created a bottleneck that could delay an entire day's deliveries, the integrated workflow allows coordinators to schedule multiple orders in rapid succession, with each submission taking only seconds. This has been particularly valuable during month-end peaks when order volumes typically surge.
The gateway architecture provides a foundation for future enhancements. The company has identified several opportunities for extending the integration, including pulling delivery status updates back from Webfleet to provide real-time tracking within the ERP, implementing automated route optimisation based on daily order volumes and geographic clustering, and adding support for delivery confirmation and proof-of-delivery capture.
One of the key success factors in this implementation was identifying the right point in the existing workflow to introduce the integration. Rather than building a separate dispatch module, the team embedded the Webfleet submission into the existing order lifecycle. This meant that dispatch coordinators did not need to learn a new interface or adopt a new process; they simply gained an additional action on a screen they already used daily. Businesses considering similar integrations should map their existing workflows carefully and identify the natural handoff point where fleet management data is needed.
Isolating the third-party API interaction behind a dedicated gateway class proved invaluable for testing, debugging, and future extensibility. When API issues arose during development, the team could inspect and modify the gateway layer without touching the core application logic. This pattern also makes it straightforward to swap out or supplement the fleet management provider in the future, should business requirements change. Any business integrating with external logistics platforms should consider this architectural approach.
The integration's prerequisite checks, requiring a geocoded address before allowing dispatch, eliminated an entire category of errors. Rather than validating data at the point of API submission and handling failures reactively, the system ensures data completeness proactively. Businesses should apply this principle broadly: validate and enrich data at the point of capture, not at the point of consumption.
Using environment-based configuration allowed the team to test the full integration workflow against a sandbox Webfleet account before going live. This avoided the risks associated with testing against production fleet data and gave the team confidence that the integration would behave correctly at launch. Any integration with external platforms should include a clear environment strategy that supports safe testing.
While a one-directional integration (pushing data to the fleet management platform) delivered significant value, the greatest long-term benefits come from closing the loop. Pulling delivery confirmations, actual arrival times, and exception data back into the ERP would enable performance analytics, customer notifications, and continuous process improvement. Businesses should design their initial integration with bidirectional data flow in mind, even if the return journey is implemented in a later phase.
The challenges this company faced are not unique to industrial distribution. Any business that manages its own delivery fleet, whether in wholesale distribution, food and beverage, building supplies, medical equipment, or field services, will recognise the friction of disconnected dispatch processes. The Webfleet Connect API, and similar fleet management APIs offered by other providers, make it feasible for businesses of any size to embed logistics intelligence directly into their operational systems.
The key insight from this case study is that the value of a fleet management platform increases dramatically when it is connected to the systems that generate and manage the work. A standalone fleet management tool provides visibility over vehicles; an integrated fleet management system provides visibility over the entire order-to-delivery chain.
For businesses evaluating this type of integration, the investment is modest relative to the operational gains. The core integration described in this case study was implemented with a single gateway class, a controller action, a database table, and a handful of UI components. The architectural simplicity is deliberate: fleet management integration does not need to be a large-scale IT project. With a well-designed API gateway and a clear understanding of the workflow integration point, most businesses can achieve a working integration within a short development cycle.
By integrating TomTom's Webfleet platform directly into their order management system, this industrial distributor transformed its delivery dispatch from a manual, error-prone bottleneck into a streamlined, single-click operation. The integration eliminated data transcription errors, reduced dispatch time per order from minutes to seconds, and gave the entire organisation visibility over delivery operations without leaving the ERP. For businesses managing their own delivery fleets, this case study demonstrates that the path to operational efficiency lies not in adopting more tools, but in connecting the tools they already have.
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