Sagawa ExpressLogisticsJapan
Replacing phone-and-spreadsheet courier bookings with an online platform
A national courier's pickup requests arrived by phone and were tracked in spreadsheets. Our team designed the online booking platform and driver application that replaced both.
Who did this workDesign and product leadership by our team, delivered while at Monstarlab for Sagawa Express.
The result
~1.3×
operational efficiency after launch
Technologies & disciplines
- User research
- Service design
- Information architecture
- Prototyping
- UI design
- Mobile application design
- Design systems
The situation
One of Japan's largest courier companies took pickup requests by telephone. An operator answered the call, wrote down the address, the time window and the parcel details, and maintained the day's schedule in spreadsheets. Every request cost operator time, every transcription was a chance to introduce an error, and the volume of calls set a ceiling on how much the operation could grow. Drivers received their runs on paper and had no way to report progress back other than calling in.
What we did
Mapped the existing process end to end with the people doing it — operators, dispatchers and drivers — before designing any screen, because the spreadsheet contained rules nobody had written down.
Designed a customer-facing booking flow that captured a pickup in a single pass, with address, time window and parcel details validated at entry rather than corrected later by an operator.
Designed a driver application for the run itself: the day's assignments, sequencing, status updates and proof of pickup, built for one-handed use in a vehicle.
Gave dispatchers a live operational view, so the schedule was a shared source of truth rather than a spreadsheet on one machine.
Ran the rollout in stages against the phone process rather than switching it off, so the operation always had a fallback while confidence was built.
The result
- Pickup requests moved from telephone and spreadsheets to an online platform used by customers directly.
- Roughly 1.3× operational efficiency measured against the previous process.
- Materially reduced operator workload — time previously spent transcribing calls was returned to exception handling and customer service.
- Drivers reported status from the application, giving dispatch visibility that the paper process could not provide.
Why this one is worth reading
Nothing about this project was technically exotic. The difficulty was that a functioning manual process — with years of undocumented rules embedded in it — had to keep running while it was replaced. The efficiency gain came from removing transcription and rework, not from any single feature.
That pattern repeats constantly in the small and mid-sized businesses we work with today: a process that works, is expensive to run, and is held together by one person’s spreadsheet.
Keep reading
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Tell us what you are trying to build.
A 30-minute call with the people who would do the work — not a sales team. We will tell you honestly whether we are the right team for it.
- On the call
- Your goals, what exists today and the first steps. No account manager in between.
- Afterwards
- A written scope and a price within days — or a straight answer that we are not the right team.
- No obligation
- Nothing is committed until a scope is signed, and anything we send you is yours to keep.
We reply to every inquiry within one business day. Prefer email? info@sparqweb.com