Sample-tracking across Asia for a Fortune Global 100 energy major

The challenge

A Fortune Global 100 energy company runs a regional lubricants programme across multiple Asian markets. Distributors and large industrial customers periodically submit oil samples for analysis, which are physically shipped to a central laboratory based in Singapore.

The pre-existing workflow had three problems:

1. No single source of truth. Sample status was tracked in a mix of spreadsheets, email threads, and a legacy ticketing tool. Stakeholders in different countries each had a partial view.
2. Lead-time opacity. Distributors couldn't see how long samples had been in transit or in the analysis queue. Lab operations couldn't easily flag bottlenecks.
3. Manual reconciliation. When a sample went missing or arrived damaged, tracing back through the chain of custody took days.

For a programme where lab outputs feed into commercial decisions, the operational friction was real - and unacceptable as the programme scaled.

The approach

We ran a four-phase engagement:

• Discovery (3 weeks). Workshops with the regional lubricants team, the lab operations lead, and three pilot distributors. Output: a written process map, a target operating model, and a phased build plan.
• Build (12 weeks). A 5-person team - technical partner, two full-stack engineers, one designer, one QA. Two-week sprints, Friday demos, written change log.
• Pilot (6 weeks). Rolled to two distributor markets first. Daily standup with the operator's lab team. Two production hotfix cycles, then stabilised.
• Rollout (8 weeks). Phased rollout across all distributor markets, with playbooks for each market's customs and shipping conventions.

The key architectural decision: model the sample itself as the central object, with state transitions explicitly logged. Every event - received at distributor, dispatched, in customs, received at lab, in queue, analysed, results delivered - became a first-class entity with a timestamp, an actor, and supporting documents.

The outcome

• One operational dashboard for the lab operations lead, replacing the previous spreadsheet-and-email workflow.
• Distributor self-service portal with sample-status visibility, removing the support burden on the operator's regional team.
• Lead-time analytics that surfaced shipping bottlenecks the team hadn't previously seen - and let them renegotiate two regional courier contracts on the basis of data.
• Multi-market coverage under one platform, with country-specific customs and language handling.

Specific numbers are withheld at the client's request.

Tech stack

Next.js · TypeScript · PostgreSQL · AWS · GitHub Actions · Sentry · Datadog.

Why this matters for global buyers

Most lab-tracking platforms are built for a single jurisdiction. This one had to handle multi-country customs, multiple time zones, multiple operational teams, and a centralised lab whose throughput is the gate on the entire programme.

If your operations span markets where physical goods or samples move across borders into a central analysis or processing point, the architecture above generalises directly. The bottleneck is rarely the technology - it's modelling the chain of custody honestly, then letting every stakeholder see the same picture.

If that sounds like your situation, book a 30-minute scoping call.