Rhenus Logistics handles an average of 1.4 million tonnes of breakbulk per year at the Rotterdam waterfront, a serious operation that still ran largely on paper. Work orders, discharging lists and timesheets lived in binders and in the heads of experienced people. The ambition was clear: digitise the entire port call process, for planners, checkers, supervisors and captains alike.
We started on the terminals, not in a meeting room: two working sessions at Waalhaven and Maasvlakte, prioritising the process together with the operation using MoSCoW. Then we built the MVP in two-week sprints, including integration with the existing TRIS terminal system, a domain model as the blueprint, and a DTAP street for safe deployments. Every sprint ended with a working demo on the quay's terms: does this actually help the shift that starts at six?
A working port call system in four sprints, used by every role in the process, from work order to signed-off operations report. Knowledge that used to live in binders is now shared, human error has structurally decreased, and Rhenus owns a data foundation to keep building on. Full documentation and source code included: no vendor lock-in, by design.
