Build

Vantar: a full-stack field operations PWA

A logistics platform for a veteran-owned medical courier company managing federal and commercial contracts: real-time dispatch, chain-of-custody proof, financial analytics, and an AI assistant built into the workflow.

Role

Solo: product scope, database, UI, AI integration, deployment

Timeline

May 2026–August 2026, ongoing maintenance

Stack

React, Vite, Supabase, Claude API, Vercel

Vantar owner Dashboard: active runs, delivered-this-month, open contracts, SAM expiry, miles and run-type breakdown, and a recent-runs list

Owner Dashboard: business metrics at a glance. Seed/demo account, no real client, contract, or driver data shown.

The business

The client, 29 Integrity Logistics, LLC, is a 100% service-disabled veteran who owns a small SDVOSB (Service-Disabled Veteran-Owned Small Business) medical courier company, specimen and supply deliveries, split between federal contracts sourced through SAM.gov (the federal contracting portal; VA, DoD, HHS) and commercial/broker-booked hauls. Before this product existed, the business ran on paper logs, text messages, and spreadsheets, which created three concrete gaps:

Chain of custody was unverifiable

Medical specimen transport carries real compliance stakes, and there was no timestamped, geotagged record tying a photo or signature to a specific delivery.

Office and road didn't share a record

A dispatcher assigning a run and a driver executing it had no shared, real-time view of status.

Financial visibility was reactive

SAM.gov registration lapses, contract renewals, and margin per run were things the owner found out about late, not early.

The brief, in effect: build the tool a two-person office-and-fleet operation actually needs, not a scaled-down version of enterprise transportation-management software they'd never fully use.

Who it's for

Three roles, three genuinely different jobs, one shared data model. Rather than one dashboard with permission-gated widgets, each role gets a different home screen built around its actual task: a dispatcher opens the app to decide something, a driver opens it to do something.

Owner / Head Admin

Desk, intermittently on the road. Needs business health at a glance: revenue, compliance deadlines, fleet status, contract pipeline.

Dispatcher

Desk. Needs to assign runs, track them in real time, and manage fleet and crew.

Driver / Crew

One-handed, in a vehicle, often with poor signal. Needs today's run, fast proof-of-delivery capture, and to get paid correctly.

Design decisions

A different home screen per role, not one dashboard with permissions

The owner's Dashboard leads with business metrics and compliance alerts; the driver's is a "Today / Upcoming" run list with nothing else competing for attention. That split came directly from watching how differently the two roles actually open the app.

Honest degradation over silent failure

When the live SAM.gov call fails (which, for a public government API, it sometimes does), the UI states the failure reason where the results would go, and computes any relative deadlines off today's date instead of shipping dates that quietly go stale. No results means no results, not fabricated ones.

Reliability is the UX, not a separate concern

A driver on a weak cell connection who sees "Uploading…" with no feedback and no retry doesn't have a technical problem, they have a lost proof-of-delivery problem. Every upload has an explicit timeout so a stalled request fails visibly and retryably, and photos are compressed client-side before upload since phone-camera JPEGs routinely run 3–12MB.

What shipped

Built around a shared Postgres schema with role-scoped access enforced at the database layer (Supabase Row Level Security), not just hidden in the UI. Six surfaces below cover the core workflow; plus fleet/driver records with compliance-doc expiry alerts, an offline queue for low-signal areas, in-app team messaging, and IFTA (International Fuel Tax Agreement) mileage reporting, live but not detailed individually here.

Dispatch & run tracking

Runs move through a fixed status pipeline with real-time updates (Supabase Realtime), split by contract vs. commercial and by loaded vs. deadhead miles.

Chain of custody

Camera capture with GPS tagging, touch signature capture, and an event log written on every status change: the compliance-critical flow the whole product exists to fix.

Federal contract matching

Live SAM.gov opportunity search, AI-scored against the company's NAICS (federal industry-classification) codes and SDVOSB status, with an explicit failure state, not invented listings, if the government API is down.

Financial analytics

Revenue vs. expense trends, cost-per-mile, and expense breakdown by category, plus an auto-generated invoice from any completed run.

AI assistant + anomaly detection

A Supabase Edge Function proxies the Claude API for an in-app assistant scoped to the company's own live data, and flags runs running >40% over average duration.

Vehicle inspection

Pre-trip and post-trip checklists (tires, brakes, lights, cargo, temp-sensitive storage) with Pass/Fail/N/A per item; a failed item blocks submission until the driver adds a note.

A closer look

Vantar Contracts page: SAM.gov opportunity matches, scored against the company's NAICS codes, with a match-quality score and a one-click save-as-contract action

Contracts: live SAM.gov opportunities, AI-scored against the company's NAICS codes. Seed/demo account, no real client or contract data shown.

Vantar Finances Analytics tab: revenue vs. expense line chart and an expenses-by-category bar chart

Finances → Analytics: revenue/expense trend and cost breakdown, the source for the "Financial analytics" surface above. Seed/demo account, no real financial data shown.

Vantar Run Detail page: delivered status, pickup, dropoff, and load details, with View/Add Photos and Download Chain of Custody PDF actions

Run detail: the chain-of-custody flow the product exists to fix, photo capture and a branded PDF, one tap away. Seed/demo account, no real run data shown.

Vantar AI Assistant docked panel, answering a query about July 2026 financial data with a categorized summary

The AI assistant, scoped to the company's own live data, answering a financial-summary question mid-workflow. Seed/demo account, no real financial data shown.

Vantar Vehicle Inspection checklist: Pre-Trip tab with Pass, Fail, and N/A per item, and a warning banner requiring notes on any failed item

Vehicle inspection: a failed item blocks submission until the driver adds a note, not a silent checkbox.

Vantar IFTA Report: quarterly mileage by jurisdiction, with a CSV export

IFTA Report: quarterly mileage by jurisdiction, exportable for filing. Seed/demo account, no real mileage data shown.

How this differs from off-the-shelf fleet software

Most trucking/TMS (transportation-management software) tools ship the same generic feature set whether the cargo is freight or lab specimens. Three things here don't show up on a typical off-the-shelf feature list:

Contract matching, not just tracking

SAM.gov opportunities are pulled live and AI-scored against the company's actual NAICS codes and SDVOSB status: ranked matches with a one-click "save as contract," not a search box the owner has to babysit.

An AI assistant wired into live data

Not a chat widget bolted on. It answers "show me this month's expenses" by querying the real revenue/expense tables, scoped server-side to that company only, grounded in the current date so it doesn't reason from stale training-data time.

Chain-of-custody as a first-class flow

Photo, GPS, and signature on every status change, because "delivery proof" means something more specific for a company hauling lab specimens under federal contracts than for a general freight hauler.

That's not a claim this beats mature TMS platforms feature-for-feature. ELD/HOS (electronic logging device / hours-of-service) compliance and live fuel-card integration aren't built, and would likely mean integrating an existing certified provider rather than building from scratch. The case for this product is narrower: built deep around the real constraints of one business, instead of a broad tool the business configures around the parts that don't fit.

Performance

Lighthouse audit, production build:

97
Performance
100
Accessibility
100
Best Practices
100
SEO

Why this is here

A working owner, real compliance deadlines, and no budget for enterprise software set the actual constraints here, not a brief. Understanding the business meant sitting with how the owner and drivers actually worked, not just interviewing them: the paper logs, the texts, the spreadsheets they were replacing. From there it was scoping what a two-person office-and-fleet operation would actually use, then building it end to end, database schema, role-based UI, AI integration, and deployment, and keeping it running for a client who depends on it. That's the competency this project demonstrates: taking a real business problem through to a shipped, maintained tool, not a research exercise or a portfolio piece built without a client on the other end of it.