Where they started
NORTHPIER books freight across eleven carriers, each with its own API quirks. When a label request failed, operators re-entered the shipment by hand, sometimes creating a second booking.
What they built
A booking workflow validates the address, rates the shipment, books it and generates the label as separate steps. Carrier calls run with a concurrency key per carrier, so one slow API no longer blocks the others.
When a carrier changes a field and every booking starts failing, the runs pause instead of dying. The team ships the mapping fix and bulk-replays the paused runs from the booking step.
What changed
Manual re-keys dropped 31% in the first quarter, and duplicate bookings stopped entirely because every booking call carries the shipment ID as its idempotency key.
