Realtime Warehouse Coordination with AI Development

Our client, a rapidly expanding business, faced a critical operational challenge after adding a second facility—a large warehouse. Effective communication between the front desk team in Building 1 and the warehouse/loading team in Building 2 was essential for efficiency and safety. They required a web application to streamline this process, enabling the front desk to log customer arrivals and assign loading lanes while the warehouse team managed bay assignments and loading status. The app needed to support 10-15 simultaneous users with realtime updates, integrate with their Business Central ERP system to update sales orders, and maintain a historical log of customer activity.

The functional requirements were precise:

• Front Desk (Building 1): Log customer details (name, order ID, vehicle type) and assign a loading lane, adding customers to a queue sorted from oldest to newest.
• Warehouse Team (Building 2): Access all front desk features, plus the ability to reassign lanes, assign bays (two lanes with three bays each), and mark customers as loaded, removing them from the queue and freeing the bay.
• Realtime Updates: Ensure all users see changes instantly, with bay assignments locked to prevent conflicts.
• Data Logging: Record timestamps for queue addition, bay assignment, and loading completion, with a dedicated history page for review.
• ERP Integration: Update sales order status to “Loaded” and log timestamps in Business Central without requiring user licenses.

This project demanded a robust tech stack, seamless realtime communication, and an intuitive interface. Traditionally, such a solution could take 60 hours or more to develop. By leveraging AI-assisted development, we delivered a fully functional application in just 25 hours - a 60% time reduction - while maintaining complete control over quality and architecture.

Accelerating Development with AI: Our Approach

At Siberus, we harnessed AI tools like Claude and Gemini-2.5 to supercharge our development process, delivering exceptional value to our client. Here’s how we achieved this...

Owning the Tech Stack

We retained full control over technology decisions, ensuring the stack aligned with the client’s functional requirements. For this project, we chose:

• Astro: A fast, front-end-focused framework ideal for the app’s minimal back-end needs.
• WebSockets: Enabled realtime notifications to keep both teams synchronized, critical for the requirement of instant updates.
• PostgreSQL with Drizzle ORM: Managed relational data and migrations, supporting the complex relationships in the customer queue and bay assignments.
• Effector: Facilitated clean state management with its sample function, allowing decoupled logic for events like form submissions.
• Shadcn: Provided polished, accessible UI components for a seamless user experience.
  This carefully curated stack ensured scalability, performance, and maintainability, tailored to the client’s realtime and data-intensive needs.

Elevating UI and Functionality

AI removed traditional trade-offs between functionality and polish. With the time saved, we enhanced the app’s user interface with smooth animations and intuitive workflows, exceeding the client’s expectations. For example, the front desk’s form for logging customer details (name, order ID, vehicle type) was built using Tanstack Form with clear validation and styling, completed in minutes. AI allowed us to iterate quickly, ensuring the UI was both functional and visually appealing without compromising core features.
Additionally, AI enabled us to explore extended functionality. Initially, the app didn’t account for managing multiple locations, but the client expressed interest in this feature. Using AI, we efficiently prototyped a database schema update and logic to handle multi-location coordination, a task that would have been cost-prohibitive without AI’s speed.

Unlocking Broader Digital Transformation

AI’s efficiency meant the client could stretch their budget further. Instead of prioritizing one project, they could pursue multiple digital initiatives. For this project, we not only delivered the web app but also currently integrating it with Business Central to sync sales order statuses and timestamps automatically. AI tools accelerating the development of this integration, enabling a seamless connection without requiring additional licenses, as specified in the requirements.
This approach opens the door to a complete digital transformation. Clients can now realize integrations, automations, and plugins that were previously sidelined due to cost constraints, all within the budget of a single project.

Simplifying DevOps

Deploying complex applications often involves navigating intricate cloud configurations, which can be time-consuming. AI streamlined this process by summarizing documentation and generating accurate configurations. For this project, we set up an Azure App Service, PostgreSQL in a private virtual network, and container instances for database migrations (using Docker). What typically takes hours was completed in a fraction of the time, thanks to AI’s ability to pinpoint the right settings and scripts, ensuring compliance with best practices.

Effortless Refactoring for Evolving Requirements

Client feedback often leads to new requirements, requiring significant refactoring. AI made this process fast and efficient. For instance, after the initial demo, the client requested support for multiple locations. Using AI, we refactored the app’s architecture in hours, updating the database schema and business logic. We also iterated through three WebSocket implementations to identify the most robust solution, ensuring scalability and reliability for the realtime requirements.

Navigating Large Codebases with Ease

While this was a greenfield project, AI’s ability to process documentation and business logic is invaluable for legacy codebases. Tools like Atlassian MCP, paired with AI, can map complex documentation to code, accelerating innovation in established systems. If your organization has a legacy codebase, we can help you modernize it efficiently.

Comprehensive and Seamless Documentation

One of AI’s standout strengths is its ability to generate clear, comprehensive documentation throughout the development process. For this project, we used AI to produce detailed documentation covering the application’s architecture, API endpoints, database schema, and user workflows. This included step-by-step guides for the front desk and warehouse teams, ensuring they could use the app effectively from day one. AI also helped us document the Business Central integration, specifying how sales order statuses and timestamps are synced.
This documentation is not only thorough but also structured for easy handoff. If the client chooses to maintain the application internally, they have everything they need to continue seamlessly. Of course, we hope you’ll keep Siberus in mind for future projects!