Our carriers all use different portals. Does that matter?

It adds integration work per carrier but not complexity to the design. Each gets a connector — API, EDI, or scheduled export — and downstream everything is normalised into one shape.

Yes. EDI remains widespread in freight and is well-defined enough to automate reliably, including translation between EDI and the JSON your newer systems expect.

Do we have to replace the tools we already use?

No. Automation works best on top of the stack you have. We connect to your existing CRM, inbox, spreadsheets, and billing system through their APIs rather than asking you to migrate anything.

What happens when an automation fails?

It retries with backoff, and if it still cannot complete, the job lands in a queue and a human gets alerted with the exact input that failed. Nothing disappears silently — that is the single most important design rule.

Workflow Automation · Logistics

Workflow Automation for Logistics

Every handoff in a shipment is a form somebody retypes.

A single consignment generates booking confirmations, manifests, customs paperwork, tracking events, proof of delivery, and an invoice — moving between carrier portals, your TMS, and email. Automation carries the data across those boundaries and watches for the milestones that never arrive.

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Typical stack

n8n
Make
Python
Temporal
REST & Webhooks

Use cases

What this handles for logistics operators

Move booking, manifest, and customs data between carrier portals and your TMS
Monitor tracking milestones and raise an exception the moment one slips
Match proof of delivery to invoices and flag discrepancies before disputes arise
Send proactive customer updates on dispatch, delay, and delivery automatically

Shipment data flows between systems on its own, and delays surface before the customer notices them.

Context

The logistics problem underneath it

Logistics runs on documents and status enquiries — bills of lading, customs paperwork, proof of delivery, and an endless stream of 'where is my shipment' calls. Both are highly automatable, and both currently consume operational staff who should be handling actual exceptions.

Shipping documents arrive in every format and get manually keyed into the TMS
Status enquiries flood phone and email, most of them answerable from tracking data
Exceptions and delays are spotted late because nobody is watching continuously
Carrier rates and capacity live across portals, spreadsheets, and inboxes

What we build

Inside a workflow automation

We watch the process before we automate it. That means sitting with whoever runs it today, recording the actual clicks, and finding the branches nobody documented — the exceptions, the manual overrides, the 'except when it's this customer' rules. Then we build it, including the failure paths, because an automation that silently breaks is worse than the manual process it replaced.

Event-driven pipelines triggered by email, webhook, form, schedule, or file drop
Two-way sync between CRM, billing, support, spreadsheets, and internal databases
Conditional branching that handles the exceptions your team currently handles manually
Retry logic, dead-letter queues, and alerting so failures surface immediately
Document and report generation with data pulled live from source systems
Audit logs recording every run, input, and outcome for compliance review

Deliverables

What ships with the engagement

Process map of the current workflow with time and error cost per step
Production automation with staging environment for safe changes
Monitoring dashboard showing runs, failures, and processing volume
Alerting into Slack or email when a run needs human attention
Handover documentation so your team can adjust rules without us

FAQ