Guide · Control room
A fleet control room and video wall: what to put on each screen.
Most transport video walls show a map full of dots and nothing anyone acts on. A good wall shows exceptions, owners and the next action, pane by pane.
A control room is worth building when a transporter has more trucks on the road than one person can track by phone. The video wall is the visible part; the value is in what each pane makes someone do. Start from decisions, not from maps.
Four rules for a wall people actually use
- Exceptions first. Show what is late, expiring, stuck or unpaid, not everything that is fine.
- One owner per pane. Every pane belongs to a role that acts on it: operations, accounts, maintenance, management.
- Numbers you can click. Every count opens the list behind it, so the wall and the desk show the same truth.
- Honest data. A pane without a live data source should say so, rather than show convincing sample numbers.
A 12-pane layout for a transport company
| Pane | What it shows | Who acts |
|---|---|---|
| Live map | Trucks on the road, coloured by status | Operations |
| Trip delays | Trips late against ETA, with the reason | Operations, customer desk |
| Gate | Bays loading and unloading, waiting time | Branch |
| E-way bills | Bills expiring in the next hours, Part-B pending | Operations |
| Detention | Trucks at risk of detention charges | Operations, management |
| ePOD | PODs received, matched and pending | Accounts |
| Driver desk | Open driver tickets, advances, SOS | Fleet desk |
| Tyres | Tyres below tread or due for rotation | Maintenance |
| Stores | Parts to reorder | Maintenance |
| Challans | New traffic challans, linked to the driver at that time | Fleet desk |
| Lane P&L | Margin by lane after the empty return | Management |
| CFO cockpit | 13-week cash plan, receivables | Owner, finance |
The wall is not the alert system
Nobody watches a wall at 2 AM. The same rules that light up a pane should send a WhatsApp message to the right role group, deduplicated and grouped into digests, so the wall is for shared awareness and the phone is for action.
Hardware and layout notes
- Size the wall for the room: panes must be readable from the back row, so fewer, larger numbers beat dense tables.
- Keep the same layout on a laptop and a phone, role-wise, so the owner sees the wall’s view anywhere.
- Use colour for state only (late, at risk, fine), not decoration.
- Rotate deep-dive screens on one pane rather than shrinking everything.
Common mistakes
- A map as the whole wall. Dots do not tell anyone what to do.
- Panes nobody owns, so alerts are seen and ignored.
- Different numbers on the wall and in accounts, so management stops trusting both.
- Building the wall before the data: GPS, e-way bills and PODs must flow first.
The Autowhat control room
SCM for Transporter ships more than 45 role-wise screens, including a command center and a 12-pane video wall with exactly these panes: live map, delays, gate, e-way bills, detention, ePOD, driver desk, tyres, stores, challans, lane P&L and the CFO cockpit. Panes without a connected data source show a “Sample data” label instead of pretending. The same rules send WhatsApp alerts to the right role. Related: AI agents for transport companies and lane profitability.
Questions
What is a fleet control room?
A room, or a set of screens, where a transport company watches its trucks, documents and money in one place and acts on exceptions: delays, expiring e-way bills, detention, pending PODs and dues.
How many screens does a video wall need?
Start with the decisions. Twelve panes cover operations, documents, maintenance and money for most transporters; fewer, larger panes are better than many small ones.
Do I need a physical video wall?
No. The same role-wise views work on a laptop and a phone. A wall helps when a team works the same shift in one room.
See it on your own data. SCM for Transporter runs the bilty, e-way bill, trips, billing and accounts in one system. Book a 30-minute working session with an engineer.