Logistics & Supply Chain App & AI Development

Logistics software is anything that plans, records or exposes the movement of goods, the suppliers behind them and the paperwork around them — from warehouse and transport systems to supplier portals, booking tools and pricing engines. Off-the-shelf products cover the common ground well, so custom software earns its place at the edges: the process that is specific to how you trade, the integration between two systems that were never meant to meet, or the portal your customers and suppliers actually use. If a package fits, buy the package. We are usually called in for the part no package covers.

It makes the approved list the easiest route rather than the slowest one. A portal lets a buyer search suppliers by location, category and whatever criteria you approve on, submit a request against a real workflow, and exchange documents in a place that keeps a record. For Westbury Street Holdings we put hundreds of approved suppliers on a searchable map and signed existing staff in through the login they already had, so there was no new account to create. Read more on our portal development page.

Usually, yes — the method depends on what the system exposes. A modern API is straightforward; an older system may mean scheduled file exchange, a database view or a middleware layer that presents one consistent interface to everything built afterwards. That middleware pattern is what we built for Hayley Group, where a hub sits between existing and new applications. See system integration for how we approach it.

Start with the spreadsheet that has the most people waiting on it. Price list rebuilds, stock reconciliations and booking diaries are the usual candidates, because they are well understood, repeat constantly and fail in visible ways. Moving one of those into an application gives you a shared record, an audit trail and a set of rules that do not depend on who is in the office. Our spreadsheet to app page describes the process.

A focused first release — one portal, one integration, one replaced process — typically lands in a matter of weeks rather than months, and we work in short sprints so you see it running early rather than at the end. Larger programmes get broken into releases that each stand on their own. If you want to test the idea before committing to a build, app idea validation and rapid MVP development are the lighter-weight routes in.

Cost follows scope: the number of systems to integrate with, how much of your process the software has to model, and how many kinds of user need their own view of it. A single well-defined portal or integration is a far smaller commitment than a platform covering an entire operation. We publish a detailed breakdown in our guide to how much it costs to build an app, and we will give you a written estimate before any work starts.

It is, provided you point it at admin rather than at strategy. Extracting fields from supplier documents, searching a large catalogue by description, summarising exceptions and drafting the follow-up are all jobs where current models are reliable enough to save real hours. Demand prediction and network optimisation are much harder to do well and much easier to overclaim, so we would rather build the boring parts first and prove the value before going near them.

You do. We hand over the source code and the intellectual property for the work we build for you, and your data stays yours throughout. We can host and support the system afterwards or hand it to your own team — that is a commercial choice, not a lock-in. Our process page sets out how a project runs from first conversation to handover.