Logistics automation that tracks, chases, and reconciles while your team sleeps

The manual work quietly draining your ops team

Walk any freight or 3PL office and you will find the same routine. A coordinator logs into three or four carrier portals every morning, checks the status of every open shipment, and updates a spreadsheet by hand. When something slips, they draft the same delay email they have written a hundred times. When a customer asks 'where is my order', they stop what they are doing to go look it up. None of this is hard. It is just relentless, and it scales linearly with volume, so every new client means another few hours a day of pure lookup and copy-paste.

The back office is no better. Proof-of-delivery documents arrive as scanned PDFs, photos, or signed slips, and someone keys the details into the system so an invoice can go out. Carrier invoices arrive and get checked against agreed rates by eye, which means overcharges slip through because nobody has time to audit every line. Detention and demurrage claims sit unfiled because assembling the evidence takes longer than the claim is worth. This is the work that never makes it into a process document, and it is exactly the work a machine should own.

• Refreshing carrier portals and updating shipment status by hand every morning
• Answering 'where is my order' messages one at a time across email and WhatsApp
• Keying proof-of-delivery details off scanned PDFs and photos into your TMS
• Auditing carrier invoices line by line against agreed rate cards
• Chasing carriers for missing updates, ETAs, and delivery confirmations

What we automate, and how the pipeline actually works

We start with visibility, because it feeds everything else. We connect to your carriers and your TMS through their APIs (or an aggregator like project44, FourKites, or Shippo where per-carrier integration is not worth it) and pull shipment status on a schedule. Every update lands in one place: your TMS, a Google Sheet, a Slack channel, wherever your team actually looks. No more portal-hopping. When a shipment misses a milestone or an ETA slips past a threshold you set, the automation fires an alert to the right person before the customer notices, not after they complain.

The document work runs on the same backbone. When a POD arrives, an LLM reads it (even a crumpled photo or a handwritten slip), extracts the reference number, delivery date, and any exceptions noted, matches it to the right shipment, and writes the result back so the invoice can go out the same hour. Carrier invoices run through the same extraction and get checked line by line against your rate card, so overcharges get flagged automatically instead of paid quietly. The orchestration lives in n8n, self-hosted in the EU so your shipment and customer data never leaves your control, with Make or Zapier handling the simpler app-to-app moves. When something is genuinely off-script, it routes to a human with full context instead of failing silently.

The workflows worth building first

Not every logistics task earns an automation, so we start where the volume and the rules are clearest. Shipment tracking and proactive delay alerts are almost always first: high frequency, unambiguous logic, and a direct line to customer satisfaction. A WISMO auto-responder is a close second, because a large share of your inbound is customers asking a question your system can already answer. From there, POD capture and invoice matching tend to pay back fastest in the back office, since they turn a delayed, error-prone manual step into a same-day one.

The pattern holds across freight forwarders, 3PLs, last-mile carriers, and shippers running their own fleets. What changes is the entry point. A forwarder drowning in carrier follow-ups gets the tracking-and-chase automation first. A 3PL billing clients on delivery gets POD-to-invoice first. A shipper leaking margin gets carrier-invoice auditing first. We scope to whichever workflow has the highest volume and the clearest cost per run, ship that, and let the win buy trust for the next one. It ties into the wider workflow automation and document-processing work we do, so the pieces compound instead of sitting in silos.

• Proactive shipment tracking with delay and exception alerts pushed to Slack or email
• WISMO auto-responder that answers status questions from live TMS data
• Proof-of-delivery capture and matching from PDFs, photos, and signed slips
• Carrier invoice auditing against your rate card, with overcharges flagged
• Automated customer invoicing the moment a delivery is confirmed
• Detention and demurrage claim assembly from the evidence you already have

What it takes to build, and what you own at the end

A scoped logistics automation is a matter of weeks, not quarters. We spend the first week mapping the workflow exactly as your team runs it today: which portals, which fields, which rules, which exceptions. Then we build the pipeline, test it against your real shipments, and run it in draft mode where it proposes actions and a human approves, so you see the accuracy on your own data before anything runs unattended. Most single workflows are live in two to four weeks. A broader rollout across tracking, documents, and invoicing runs longer, but each piece ships and starts earning on its own.

You own what we build. The automations run on your accounts and your infrastructure, the data stays in the EU, and every run is logged so you can see what happened and reconstruct it later. There is no black box and no lock-in to a platform only we understand. We document the workflow, hand over the logic, and keep running and maintaining it as your carriers, rates, and volumes change, which they will. When a carrier changes its portal or you add a new lane, we adapt the automation instead of leaving you with a broken script.

Results, ROI, and when not to automate

The math on logistics is unusually blunt, which is why we like it. A coordinator spending three hours a day on portal checks and status emails is roughly 60 hours a month, and a tracking automation takes that close to zero. A WISMO auto-responder that handles even half of a few hundred monthly status questions hands back another full day a week. Catching a 3% overcharge rate on carrier invoices often pays for the entire build inside a quarter. Because we tie our fee to the automation actually running in production, we scope to these numbers first: how many runs, how many minutes each, what a missed exception costs. If the numbers do not clear the bar, we say so before we build.

And sometimes the answer is no. If you move a handful of shipments a week, an automation costs more than it saves, and a shared inbox with a good template beats a pipeline. If your carriers have no API and no portal worth scraping, visibility automation has nothing to stand on, and we will tell you that rather than sell you a fragile workaround. Anything that needs real judgement (a damaged high-value load, a customs dispute, a claim with legal exposure) stays with a person who has better context because the automation gathered the facts. The goal is not a lights-out warehouse. It is handing your team back the hours they lose to lookups and copy-paste so they can handle the exceptions that actually need them.