Operating platform, 0→1

The problem

Company operations ran on Google Sheets and a patchwork of SaaS subscriptions. No single source of truth, manual reporting, no way to enforce process, and every new operational requirement meant another spreadsheet or another subscription.

Why it mattered

A physical fleet business generates operational data continuously — telemetry, inventory movements, expiration dates, service events. Running that on spreadsheets does not just cost time; it makes whole categories of work impossible. Lot-code traceability, recall execution, and velocity-driven forecasting are not spreadsheet problems.

What I built

A multi-module internal platform. The modules, and what each one actually does:

• Machine detail — per-unit state, telemetry, service history
• Dispatching — the routing system described in Autonomous technician dispatch
• Restocking — pick lists and execution tracking
• Inventory — transfer logs, lot-code tracking, waste, expiration management, FDA/USDA recall traceability, and a full audit trail across every inventory movement
• Menu optimization — location-level assortment
• Demand planning — 12-month forecasts, seasonality, and reorder cadence
• Product settings — vendor records, lead times, nutritional information, allergens
• Executive reporting — operating metrics for leadership and board materials

I also moved the platform off a prototyping environment onto production hosting, which meant working through lockfile, monorepo, and Node runtime issues that had nothing to do with the product and everything to do with it staying up.

It isn’t a tool I use alone. Field technicians run their day through the dispatch and restocking modules, leadership pulls executive reporting directly instead of asking me for a number, and it’s open for any department to check whatever it needs — inventory, demand, machine status — without a spreadsheet request in between.

The clearest illustration of what the platform bought is a recall. On the old stack, tracing an affected lot across machines meant reconciling several spreadsheets by hand under time pressure. On the platform it is a query.