A bonded cargo handler on the East Coast, one month of paperwork.
This customer runs a bonded container freight station, a TSA certified screening facility and a regional trucking fleet, serving forwarders up and down the East Coast. Here is what the first full month in production looked like. The customer asked not to be named.
The situation
Hundreds of forwarders send them work. Almost none of it arrives in a structured format. It comes as emails with a master bill attached, delivery orders typed on the forwarder's own template or written by hand, copier batches of import manifests from the warehouse floor, and signed PODs that need to get back to the forwarder the same day.
Every one of those documents was being read by a customer service coordinator and re-typed by hand. Errors surfaced as wrong pickups, mismatched house bills and PODs that never made it back. The team was hiring for typing capacity, not for customer service.
Before
- Around 180 documents a day opened, read and re-typed by hand
- More than 100,000 keystrokes a day across the desk, every business day
- Five to six hours a day spent living inside the shared inbox
- Import manifests sorted by hand out of the copier tray
- PODs matched to orders by searching the inbox
- Errors found by the customer, after the fact
After
- The same 180 documents read and turned into orders automatically
- Essentially zero keystrokes: the typing is simply gone
- Customer service checks the inbox now and then, to answer customers
- Manifests split, grouped by master bill and routed to the right desk
- PODs matched and sent back to the forwarder without a search
- Anything uncertain waits in one place, with the document, before an order exists
The first 30 days in numbers
Time back
At roughly five minutes per document to read, type and check, 182 documents a day is about fifteen hours of coordinator time, every day. That is two full-time roles' worth of typing handed back to customer service, where it was supposed to be in the first place.