From paper tickets and radio calls to a live record of every job on the quay

The client is a ports services company operating at busy terminals in the region. Its crews handle the work that happens around a vessel call: stevedoring, lashing, equipment hire, cargo shifting in the yard, marine support services. For years the operation ran the way most port services operations run. Vessel schedules arrived from agents by email. Planners kept the berth program in a spreadsheet. Dispatchers assigned cranes, forklifts and gangs over VHF radio. Every piece of billable work was captured on a paper job ticket, filled in by hand on the quay and keyed into the finance system days after the work was done.

Growth broke it. More concurrent vessel calls meant more jobs running in parallel than a whiteboard and a radio channel could hold. Equipment got double-booked. Reassignments made mid-shift never reached the planners, so the plan and the quay diverged within hours of a vessel berthing. Tickets went missing between the quay and the back office, and the work they described went unbilled. When shipping lines disputed an invoice, the only evidence was a handwritten ticket and a supervisor's memory. Management saw the operation through month-end reports, long after anything could be done about what they showed.

Kentro was engaged to digitize the full operating cycle, from vessel call notification to invoice. Not a reporting layer on top of the paper, but a replacement for it: structured job orders instead of tickets, a dispatch record instead of radio traffic, and billing generated from work as it was recorded.

Paper and radio had been good enough for a smaller operation. At scale, they failed in specific and expensive ways.

• Billing ran on handwritten tickets.: Job tickets were filled in on the quay, often in rain or at night, then keyed into the finance system days after the work. Lost or illegible tickets meant completed work was never invoiced, and disputed invoices could only be defended from memory.
• Coordination lived on a radio channel.: Dispatchers assigned equipment and gangs over VHF with no record of the assignment. Mid-shift reassignments never reached the planning spreadsheet, so planners worked from a picture of the port that was already stale.
• No shared view of the operation.: The berth program sat in a spreadsheet, equipment status on a whiteboard, and crew availability in supervisors' heads. Management had no live view of the shift, only month-end reports.
• The quay is a hostile environment for software.: Any replacement had to work in gloves, in glare, and through connectivity dead zones across the yard. A system that failed offline would send crews straight back to paper.

Kentro built the platform around a structured job order: every billable action on a vessel call becomes a job order with a lifecycle, an owner, and a timestamped record. It runs as a set of services on cloud infrastructure, with an append-only event log as the system of record, a web application for planners and dispatchers, an offline-first mobile app for the quay and yard, and an integration layer into the operator's ERP.

• Vessel call and berth planning.: Planners manage the vessel call lifecycle from agent notification through berthing to departure, with each call identified by IMO number and voyage. Confirming a call generates the job orders for the services sold against it, so planning and execution share the same record.
• Digital job tickets in the field.: An offline-first mobile app on rugged devices replaces the paper ticket. Supervisors open, execute and close jobs with start and stop times, equipment identifiers, gang composition, and photo evidence. Work queues locally through dead zones and syncs in the background when coverage returns.
• Equipment and crew dispatch.: A dispatch board matches open job orders against equipment availability and shift rosters, validates operator certifications before assignment, and flags conflicts when an asset is claimed for overlapping jobs.
• Billing from the recorded work.: Closed tickets flow through a rating engine that applies the customer's contracted tariffs to recorded durations and quantities, then posts draft invoice lines to the ERP through the integration layer. The ticket record, with its timestamps and photos, is the evidence pack for any dispute.
• Dashboards on the event stream.: Because every state change is an event, management dashboards read live from the same log: berth occupancy, jobs in progress, equipment allocation, and completed work not yet invoiced.

The operation did not get a reporting tool. It got a different way of running.

• Invoices assemble from evidence.: Finance stopped re-keying handwritten tickets. Billing lines trace to closed job orders with timestamps and photos, and disputes are settled against the record instead of memory.
• Completed work stopped going unbilled.: A job closed in the field exists in the billing queue by definition. Nothing depends on a paper ticket surviving the trip from the quay to the back office.
• The plan and the quay stay in sync.: Planners, dispatchers and supervisors work from the same live job queue. Reassignments are visible the moment they happen, and the radio is now for exceptions, not for running the port.
• Management sees the shift while it is running.: Berth occupancy, active jobs and equipment allocation are visible during the shift, when intervention is still possible, rather than reconstructed at month end.