The shipment leaves on Monday, and on Friday you're still putting the folder together
The goods are ready, the truck is booked, and in the office there's a person opening the invoice, opening the packing list, opening the certificate, and looking to see whether they say the same thing
The gross weight on one document, the net weight on the other, the number of packages someone corrected by hand after the last load, the commodity code repeated on three different sheets, and one of them out of line is enough for the shipment to stop somewhere and for you to have to go round again
The work that takes your afternoon away
It isn't deciding how to ship, that's the part you know how to do, it's the steps around it, always the same ones, that nobody can skip
- The same shipment data retyped onto the invoice, onto the loading list and onto every other document in the folder
- The suppliers' documents that arrive as PDFs or Excel files, each with its own format, and have to be carried into the business software
- The line by line comparison between what was ordered, what was packed and what was invoiced
- The carriers' and the clients' portals where you upload documents and pick up tracking, each one built its own way
- The emails asking where the goods have got to, with the answer sitting inside a portal you have to open
- Filing the folder, with the right name and in the right directory, because in eight months somebody will go looking for it
The cross check either holds the goods back or sends them on their way
This is the real difference from other offices, a value that doesn't match between two documents isn't a nuisance to sort out at your own pace, it's a shipment that stops, and goods standing still cost you for every day they stand still
Comparing two documents line by line is exactly the work where a person holds out until line fifty, then starts reading what she expects to read instead of what's written, by line two hundred it's over, while for a machine line two hundred weighs the same as the first
Examples of what the system can do
These are examples of jobs the system can do, not jobs already delivered for some forwarder, Muffin Suite started recently and we'd rather say so than fill the page with logos
- It reads the invoice and the packing list, compares weights, packages, quantities and codes line by line, and puts in front of you only the differences, with a note of which document says what
- It takes the shipment data from the business software and prepares the documents in the folder from the templates you use, with nothing retyped
- It logs into the carriers' and the clients' portals with your credentials, uploads the documents needed, picks up the status and carries it back to where you look for it
- It checks that the folder is complete before it goes, and if an attachment is missing it says so now instead of when the goods are already travelling
- It files everything with the name and in the directory you use, so the folder can be found again without asking whoever was there at the time
If the business software you use offers no direct integration it makes no difference, the system works on the screens the way an operator would, and it's the house specialty, and the same goes for the portals you log into by hand every day
What stays with you
The system does the mechanical steps, the decisions stay yours, and the declaration side stays with the people who do it for a living, we don't touch it and we don't promise to touch it
When a value doesn't add up the system doesn't choose for you, it stops and leaves you the case, which is the behavior you want in an office where getting a code wrong costs more than going slowly
You decide how much autonomy to give it, at the start it's worth keeping it on a short rein, with more confirmations, then you widen it on the cases you have seen work
Why you come out ahead
The hours that go into comparisons and retyping today come back free, and you use them to follow the customers and the suppliers instead of the sheets, without hiring somebody to check columns of numbers
The hold ups that come from an inconsistent value show up earlier, when they cost little, and not once the goods have already left
You don't have to replace your software, the system uses what you already have, and we agree the monthly fee before we start, if you want an idea of what manual work costs you today there's the calculation, and if you want to see the path there's how it works