Tempo Certo is Turning Truck Scheduling Chaos Into Clockwork

Every day, thousands of delivery trucks pull up to warehouses and supermarket loading

docks across the Americas. Behind each one is a scramble of phone calls, emails, and

spreadsheets to answer a deceptively simple question: when should this truck arrive?

It's a problem Marcelo Sardagna, co-founder and CEO of Tempo Certo, spent years watching from the inside.

Before founding the company, Marcelo worked as a systems analyst for a Brazilian retail

chain, where he built the company's first dock-scheduling system. It was a desktop

application that solved some problems, but didn’t provide an end-to-end solution.

Suppliers still couldn't book a delivery window without picking up the phone or sending an email that often left out the details that matter most in logistics, like vehicle type and

product volume.

“The core problem we kept running into was a lack of autonomy on the supplier's side,”

Marcelo said. “Booking a delivery slot meant sending an email with inconsistent

information, or making a phone call, and both ate up time for the supplier or carrier and

for whoever was receiving the goods on the other end.”

When he went looking for a better solution, everything on the market was expensive and

limited. Marcelo saw an opening. He brought the idea to Oliver Kraemer, a developer with a background in web applications, and together they set out to build their own system.

It was then that Tempo Certo was born.

Built first for supermarkets and retail, though it works for any business receiving goods,

Tempo Certo gives suppliers the freedom to request delivery windows on their own, at any hour, while giving receivers a single reliable place to capture the information they need.

Retailers can schedule by volume or dollar value, track the remaining balance on a

purchase order, and stagger deliveries by product type, bringing refrigerated goods in the morning and dry goods in the afternoon.

On the yard, the platform tracks every truck from check-in to departure, flags suppliers

who book a slot and don't show, and clears the paperwork before the truck ever arrives.

What it deliberately doesn't do is replace people.

“What we leave to the human team is the physical work —counting, checking quality, and

putting product away,” Marcelo said. “We believe that part calls for human judgment. The

system just removes the administrative work around it.”

Many of Tempo Certo's features came directly from customers running real yards.

Volume-based and value-based receiving, configurable checklists for every stage of

unloading, and the newest addition — automated driver call-up by phone, SMS, and

WhatsApp — all started as customer conversations. That last one came from a high-volume customer whose staff were literally walking the yard to call drivers up manually.

Today, Tempo Certo serves more than 100 clients and has processed tens of millions of

schedules. Growth at that scale taught Marcelo a lesson he now treats as a rule.

“The biggest lesson was that growing in an organized way means staying organized from

the start, even while you're still small,” he said. “When we had 20 customers, we already

needed solid processes in place, so that by the time we hit 500, we wouldn't run into

bottlenecks.”

That mindset—“if you're not growing, you're dying,” as Marcelo puts it—is what brought

Tempo Certo to Canada, and to the Conestoga Entrepreneurship Collective (CEC). For a

company expanding into a new market, the biggest value was the doors the program

opened.

“It would be unfair to single out just one mentor. The whole CEC team was excellent,”

Marcelo said. “But I can point to Italo Andrade de Souza and Christian Snyder, who were

always around, always willing, and always paying attention when we needed help working

through a question.”

The program helped the team understand how the Canadian market actually works, with

dedicated experts walking them through topics like intellectual property. It’s clarity Marcelo calls the key to setting the right direction for the expansion. Having a mentor in Ítalo who had worked directly with systems in their space in Canada helped the team work through practical questions along the way.

For Marcelo, building Tempo Certo has been the answer to a question he asked himself

throughout his career as a systems analyst: if I can build all of this for someone else's

company, why can't I do it for my own?

“Building Tempo Certo was a dream come true,” he said. “Growing it is part of who we are

and it's also our chance to bring the improvements our platform offers to a wider world.”