Inbound Delivery & Dock Schedule Board: See the Day Before It Arrives

The problem this kills

Receiving runs blind. Trucks show up that nobody expected, two big suppliers land in the same hour and the dock is jammed, and the one delivery you actually needed is three days overdue and nobody chased it. Your "schedule" is a promised-date column buried in the PO system, a few emailed ship notices, and whatever the supervisor remembers. So you over-staff a quiet morning, under-staff a brutal afternoon, and find out about problems when the driver is already at the gate.

The promised dates exist. The ship notices exist. They're just scattered across the PO system, email, and people's heads, with no single view of the day ahead — and no controlled way to say "yes, come Thursday at 10, dock 2" instead of letting suppliers and trucks decide for you. You don't need a forklift of enterprise software to fix this, and you don't need to be a developer.

What you'll build

A simple internal web tool. You load your open PO lines with promised dates (from a CSV or your system) and, when suppliers send them, their advance-ship notices (carrier, tracking, ETA). The tool collapses multiple PO lines from the same supplier and shipment into one expected delivery, and lays them out on a day and week board grouped by dock and time slot. Your supervisor confirms each appointment — accept the proposed date or reschedule to a slot that fits — and only then is it booked on the dock calendar. The board warns you when a slot is overbooked, flags deliveries that are overdue or a no-show, sends reminder emails to suppliers and your team, and exports the whole schedule to CSV for the warehouse whiteboard or your WMS.

What's inside the Implementation Plan

The downloadable plan is a step-by-step file you paste into an AI coding agent. It opens by interviewing you about your business — how receiving plans its day today, which system your POs and promised dates come from, exactly what your PO and supplier columns are named, how many docks and slots you have, your typical and peak truck volumes, and your messy edge cases — and then it tailors the data model, the slot rules, and every later step to your answers. This is not a generic template; the agent reflects a short spec back to you and waits for your thumbs-up before it builds anything. From there it walks the agent through loading expected inbounds, collapsing PO lines into shipments, capturing optional ASN/ETA, the supervisor confirm-or-reschedule screen, the booked board with overbooking warnings, the overdue and no-show flags, reminder emails, and the CSV export — each step with a ready-to-copy prompt. There's also a fallback so you can build the whole thing today even with no API to your PO system.

The governance it includes (this is the point)

This is real receiving operations, so it ships with the controls a warehouse team needs: login so only your team can use it, row-level security so you only ever see your own site's deliveries, a complete audit trail of who confirmed, rescheduled, or cancelled which appointment and when, and a hard human-approval gate so suppliers can request a slot but cannot self-book — nothing lands on the dock calendar until a supervisor confirms it. Duplicate guards keyed on the shipment/appointment id (supplier + date + reference) stop the same delivery from being double-booked, and capacity checks warn before a dock is overbooked.

Who it's for

Receiving supervisors and warehouse planners who get surprised by deliveries and have no view of the day ahead. If you can describe how trucks show up at your dock and how you decide who comes when, you can build this.

You've got this — start with the plan, paste the first prompt, answer the interview, and you'll see tomorrow's dock board take shape the same afternoon.