Case Study
Global logistics provider automates trade documentation at scale
Industry
Function
Topic
Results
60%
Cut invoice cycle time by 60%
19M+
Processed 19M+ invoices without adding headcount
Risk
Simplified audits across trade documentation
Company Profile
Germany-based global logistics services provider with 37,000+ employees across 43 countries. As a freight forwarder, contract logistics provider, and warehouse operator, it moves more than 80 million shipments a year by road, air, sea, and rail. European groupage and intercontinental air-and-sea freight form the backbone, with food logistics as a specialty.
Challenge
Paper trade documents stretched cycle times globally
The firm moved more than 80 million shipments a year across 43 countries, but the documents that made those shipments legal, including invoices, customs declarations, hazardous goods paperwork, and bills of lading, still moved on paper and in inboxes. Cycle times stretched, audit trails fragmented, and compliance risk grew with every new corridor.
Volumes kept rising and headcount could not. Without end-to-end visibility into where a document sat in the back office, the operations and finance teams could not answer where a shipment stood, nor close the books on it predictably.
Solution
Trade document capture and SAP workflow automation
The firm deployed an intelligent capture and workflow automation platform tightly integrated with its SAP back office. Invoices, customs forms, and hazardous goods documents are ingested at the point of arrival, classified, and routed into the appropriate SAP workflow without paper handoff.
Capture extracts fielded data from heterogeneous trade documents and validates it against SAP master data. Exceptions route to the right reviewer with full context; clean documents post straight through. Process Director governs the SAP-side approvals and posting steps, giving operations end-to-end visibility from receipt to general ledger.
The same fabric handles compliance-sensitive paperwork, including customs declarations and hazardous goods documents, so audit evidence is captured natively rather than reconstructed, and document growth no longer requires headcount growth.
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