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Case study

Four hundred container moves a month, off the spreadsheet.

How Hoàng Khang, a container drayage company in Hải Phòng, replaced its operations spreadsheet with one dependable system.

Client

Hoàng Khang

Industry

Container drayage

Location

Hải Phòng, VN

Scope

Ops + billing

The client's fleet of container trucks lined up at a Hải Phòng container yard
Fig. 01 · The fleet at the yard, Hải Phòng

01 The client

A small fleet, a big month.

Hoàng Khang moves shipping containers between the port terminals of Hải Phòng, customer warehouses, and empty-container depots.

Around twenty repeat customers, a fleet of five trucks plus subcontractors, and more than four hundred jobs every month, all coordinated by one owner over the phone.

02 The problem

One spreadsheet, twelve tabs, no safety net.

The entire operation lived in one spreadsheet: twelve monthly tabs, filled in by hand between Zalo messages.

Broken formulas silently dropped jobs. Expenses arrived days late. What was owed existed only in the owner's memory. Billing was the low point: at month end, the only option was to screenshot the sheet and send it. Splitting a statement, filtering by driver, preparing tax paperwork. All manual, slow, and already the cause of fines for late filings.

bang_ke_2026.xlsx · 12 tabs
A spreadsheet of container trips with twelve month tabs, a broken formula error, and inconsistent entries
⚠ formula dropped 3 jobs

A recreation of the original spreadsheet. Sample data.

03 The approach

We started with the evidence, not the wishlist: a year of real operational data and billing statements.

01 · Questions first

Nine business questions were answered before any design touched the screen.

02 · Pressure-tested

The domain model was checked against real scenarios, not tidy demo data.

03 · Owner's language

The product speaks chuyến, cước nhận, bảng kê, công nợ. Not translations of them.

04 The solution

A system that lives in the same hand as the phone.

A job is recorded in seconds, between messages, with the truck and driver on every record.

Month-end billing that took hours of manual filtering now takes minutes: bảng kê generate automatically as clean Excel and PDF, split however the customer asks, invoices ready to issue in one download. Every payment lands against a running customer balance, so who owes what, and which truck made money, is visible at a glance. Tax figures come straight from the system, not a late night with a calculator.

Job ledger on a phone: one day's container trips with route, customer, and truck
The day's trips, logged between Zalo messages
Billing screen on a phone: auto generated statements per customer with status pills
Month-end billing, generated automatically
Customer screen on a phone: revenue and outstanding balance per customer
Who owes what, per customer, at a glance

Screens shown with sample data.

05 The AI decision

Knowing where AI didn't belong.

The last piece was data entry. Jobs arrive as Zalo messages: free text, container lists, screenshots of Excel plans. The fashionable answer was to point an AI model at them.

We measured ten real messages first, and the data disagreed. Container numbers carry an ISO 6346 check digit, so arithmetic verifies every extraction. Depots and customers form small closed lists, so lookups resolve them. The shipped feature uses no AI: paste, review, save. It reads 95 percent of container numbers, a misread cannot slip past the checksum, and it costs zero to run.

AI still built it: idea to audited production in two days, including a multi-agent code review before launch. A model may yet earn the last five percent, behind an evaluation harness on real traffic. The data decides, not the hype.

The most valuable AI decision in this project was knowing where it didn’t belong.

Nhập nhanh từ Zalo

Paste a message or screenshot

4 cont DEMU1234560, MAUU6543215, TEMU4023015, HLXU8877209
deliver 8am on 21/7 to HP warehouse
Contact Mr. Tuan : 0901 234 567
DEMU1234560 MAUU6543215 TEMU4023015 HLXU8877209

Chủ hàng

chưa rõ, chọn ở bước sau

Ngày

2026-07-21

Tuyến

HP Warehouse

Liên hệ

Mr. Tuan · 0901 234 567

4 chuyến sẽ điền sẵn

Mở bảng nhập 4 chuyến →

The flow, on-device. The product speaks Vietnamese; demo shown in English.

Step 01

Paste the message

Zalo text or a screenshot. Every container number is verified by checksum.

Step 02

The form prefills

Date, route, and contact land in the entry form. Prices come from the tariff history.

Step 03

Review, then save

One row per container. The owner confirms; nothing is guessed for him.

06 The results

400+

jobs recorded monthly

12 mo

of history imported and reconciled

Minutes

for month-end billing, not days

1

system replacing spreadsheet, memory, and calculator

Trước đây tất cả nằm trong bảng tính và trí nhớ của tôi. Giờ tôi ghi chuyến ngay trên điện thoại, cuối tháng làm bảng kê trong vài phút, và biết chính xác ai còn nợ bao nhiêu.

“Everything used to live in the spreadsheet and in my head. Now I record jobs right on my phone, month-end statements take minutes, and I know exactly who owes what.”

Owner · Hoàng Khang · Hải Phòng

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