In order to get the best deals, the logistics company's approximately 100 employees continuously communicate with customers on one side and freight companies on the other. In the past, quotes for customers and price inquiries to freight forwarders were created manually. To do this, the sales department received a customer request, transferred the data to freight software and created a PDF file with all relevant information. This went to over to pricing coordination, where employees negotiate the best conditions with the overseas freight forwarders, similar to purchasing. According to internal rules, at least three freight forwarders must be contacted. Theoretically, it would have been sufficient for the price request to simply forward the PDF file. In practice, however, due to the fast pace of day-to-day business, most overseas freight forwarders do not respond to inquiries where they first have to read the information from an attached document.

As a result, the employees in pricing coordination had no choice but to copy the data from the PDF file for each request and then paste it back into an e-mail and forward it to the freight forwarders in text form. With up to 150 price requests per day, this cumbersome process meant a significant loss of time, which was all the more problematic because Anker only has three employees in handling pricing compared to more than 20 sales employees - and they quickly became a business-critical bottleneck.

In the transport industry, it is common for inquiries to be answered with a quote within 24 hours. However, if the transport request to Anker took too long, customer orders were automatically cancelled. To make the process more efficient, IT management evaluated several software products, but none of them seemed to be able to really solve the problem, until DocuWare was found. The individual solution presentation made by their DocuWare Partner helped to convince them. DocuWare Cloud won the comparison with other products in terms of implementation time and running costs. In spring 2023, Anker decided to use this cloud-based solution.

Country:
Colombia
Industry:
Transportation / Logistics
Department:
Purchasing
Deployment:
DocuWare Cloud
Integration:
Cargowise (shipping software)