What Actually Breaks

Dispatch and assignment. Live tracking. Automated status updates. Electronic POD capture. Sometimes the client portal. Everything you rely on to know where things are.

What Should Continue

Couriers already in the field keep running — they have their assignments. Dispatch reverts to phone and manual assignment. Custody documentation reverts to paper. PODs are captured on paper and reconciled afterward.

The Questions to Ask

  • What's your manual fallback for dispatch?
  • How is custody documented when the system is down?
  • How do we get PODs during an outage?
  • Will you tell us proactively, or do we find out when tracking stops?
  • How long has your longest outage been?

The Last One Is the Honest Test

Every operation has had one. A carrier claiming otherwise either hasn't been running long enough or isn't telling you.

Paper Is Not a Failure State

It's the fallback that works when nothing else does. A courier whose chain of custody only exists digitally has a single point of failure in its compliance record.