"That would take at least six months here." The sentence comes up in almost every first call with a forwarding managing director. I understand it. Anyone who has lived through a TMS project counts in quarters.
Our automations run in production after two to four weeks. That is no art, it is a weekly plan that is the same in every project. Here it is, week by week, with what each week delivers and where it fails.
The plan only works for one process. Order capture or portal or arrivals or reconciliation. Strategy& and BVL surveyed 115 logistics providers in November 2025. 96 percent have started digitalization, 10 percent scale. Half name missing priorities as the obstacle. Five processes at once are not a priority. They are the opposite.
How to pick the one is in Optimizing processes: count first, automate second. This piece is about what comes after.
The first week is the least spectacular and decides the other three. Two things happen in parallel.
Access: credentials for the mailbox, the portal, the telematics, an export from the TMS. It sounds like an hour. It almost always takes the whole week, because three people have to approve and one is on vacation. (If you want to speed up the plan: sort out access before we start.)
Counting: a tally sheet per case. How often a day, how long, how many follow-up questions. At a forwarder with 40 trucks this gave three to five calls per dispatcher and day for arrival notices, about 45 minutes with callbacks.
Deliverable week 1: access works, the manual-work number stands, 20 example files are on the table.
Pitfall: there are no example files, "because the mails always look the same". They never do. Eight customers, eight formats was the reality at a wholesaler.
Now we write down what the process does. Every step, every exception, every rule only one person knows. At a portal confirmation it was 23 steps where the first conversation had named three, plus rules only one person knew.
From the rules comes the line between service and human: what does the service book alone, what does it hand to a person? That line is the review list. It is designed in week 2, not bolted on in week 4.
Deliverable week 2: a two-page rule set, a review-case list with reasons, test data from the 20 examples.
Pitfall: the customer wants "everything automatic for now". Then there is no review list, and the service books wrong when in doubt. We do not build that.
The service is built and runs alongside the human from mid-week. It reads, checks and writes its result to a list, but does not book yet. The clerk compares: what would the service have booked, what did I book?
At the wholesaler's order capture, the parallel week showed deviations in both directions: formats the service read wrongly, and orders that had been captured wrongly by hand. You only learn both in a parallel run.
Deliverable week 3: service runs daily, comparison list, corrected rules.
Pitfall: the portal or telematics screen behaves differently from the demo. Placeholders on load, relative times, expired sessions. Week 3 exists to find that.
The service now books on its own. Three things come with it, and we do not hand over without them. A protocol per run: read, booked, held for review. An alarm that hangs on the result, not on the run. And one page for dispatch that shows what the service did today.
The alarm is the most important part. A service that runs and books nothing because an access or a prior step failed silently is an outage. We overlooked such a case ourselves for a week, because the watchdog only checked the run. Since then it counts bookings.
Deliverable week 4: production, protocol, alarm, one handover page for the team.
Pitfall: nobody reads the protocol. That is why the alarm goes to us, not only to the customer.
Three things, honestly from the projects:
A caveat: the plan comes from about 80 processes at companies with 20 to 500 employees. A process with five systems and a development department on the customer side follows other rules. There, week 1 alone takes a month.
If you want to know whether your process fits the plan, send me three things. Which process, which systems, who releases access. I will tell you in which week we would get stuck at your company. Ask for a process check: 30 minutes, no sales pitch.
