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Case Study: Transportation / Logistics

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In addition to its headquarters in Bogotá, Anker Logistica has offices across Colombia as well as in Panama, Mexico, Guatemala and Costa Rica. Since spring 2023, the international logistics service provider has been automating its processes with DocuWare Cloud, saving a lot of time for its team. Each employee now has about three hours extra per day to tackle other tasks.

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:
Cloud
Integration:
Cargowise (shipping software)

It used to take several hours – from entering a customer inquiry into our freight software to sending the price inquiries to the overseas carriers. With DocuWare, this takes about 30 seconds. We can now use these freed-up resources to drive the growth of the company."

Alexander Bernal, IT Manager
Anker Logistica y Carga, Bogotá

Send price requests in 30 seconds

Now all employees in sales and price coordination work with DocuWare. Although the sales department still transfers the data of a freight request to the Cargowise software used at Anker, it immediately stores the PDF files generated from it in a folder monitored by DocuWare. During archiving, the DMS reads and validates all the information contained in the documents, such as the start and destination of the transport, the number of units of goods to be transported, or the accuracy of all contact details. If information is missing, DocuWare informs the sales department. Once everything is complete, the DMS automatically sends the price inquiries to the freight forwarders selected by the price coordination team and inserts the relevant data into the email text in the usual structure – without any manual copying and pasting.

Faster quote preparation

Thanks to DocuWare, the time it takes to create quotes has been drastically reduced. Just a few moments after entering the data in Cargowise, the price requests are automatically sent to the overseas freight forwarders. Bottlenecks and delays are now completely avoided. Anker has calculated that about three hours a day per employee has been freed up for other tasks. This allows pricing to concentrate fully on its actual task: negotiating the most favorable conditions in each case. Thanks to this increase in efficiency, Anker is able to significantly process more transactions and grow organically.

A particular advantage of the DMS is that the solution fully adapts to our processes. We hardly had to change anything and were able to continue working as usual even after its introduction.
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