by Rajesh Agarwal, on Jul 15, 2025 9:10:41 AM
Key takeaways
- Logistics enterprises find it challenging to achieve their goals in dynamic environments with manual processes.
- Intelligent automation imparts agility and flexibility by automating paper-based and repetitive processes.
- It facilitates the automation of important logistics use cases that improve enterprise productivity and efficiency.
Logistics enterprises handle hundreds of concurrent consignments on a daily basis. It generates huge procedural workloads that are challenging to handle manually. These work processes are paper form-driven and have to be executed under tight timelines. Minor misses avalanche into major concerns. The role of a logistics company is important in the evolving manufacturing and supply chain business landscape, which is often beleaguered with market dynamics and instabilities. However, the logistics businesses find it challenging to achieve business goals by following the manual pathways and traditional workflows when the primary business ask is adapting to changing scenarios with high agility and flexibility. Siloed functions and manual processes become a bottleneck with the expanding logistics operations. It is here that the logistics industry requires a transformational approach in the form of a highly adaptive and efficient automation platform that is not only scalable but also intelligent.
Intelligent automation is the amalgamation of robotic process automation (RPA), intelligent document processing (IDP), and artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML). It is a transformative approach that introduces process agility, optimizes operations, improves efficiency, reduces costs, and increases customer satisfaction. It enables logistics enterprises to rise above mediocrity, often dominated by supply chain volatility and infested with multitudes of repetitive processes, most of which are paper-based.
What are the challenges faced by logistics enterprises?
Logistics enterprises face huge challenges, especially while working with paper-based and repetitive processes under tight business schedules and delivery times. Some of the main challenges in the logistics domain are –
- High operational costs: Handling each consignment with comprehensive regulatory compliance in dynamic market scenarios is tedious, time-consuming, and cost-intensive. Warehousing costs during multi-modal consignment dispatches add to the costs.
- Market upheavals: Geopolitical instability, supply chain volatility, force majeures, etc, can all disrupt the supply chain and logistic framework, leading to costly delays and giving rise to process inefficiencies.
- Demanding customers: Customer expectations in the digital economy are skyrocketing. They require faster deliveries, real-time consignment updates, and personalized care. These expectations collectively put undue pressure on the logistics enterprises.
- Skilled labor shortage: Logistics enterprises require trained staff across their warehousing and transportation requirements. The demand for skilled staff falls short of the supply in the market.
- Unmanageable data volumes: The data generated with each logistics consignment is huge. When the logistics company manages hundreds of consignments on a daily basis, the data becomes quite unmanageable. It also becomes challenging to extract any meaningful and actionable insights.
How does intelligent automation transform and benefit the logistics company operations?
Intelligent automation automates repetitive processes and bridges the gap between the fully automated, semi-automated, and purely manual processes. It enables the logistics enterprises to address tasks in real-time by clearing the bottlenecks created by the paper-file routes. It improves the real-time visibility of the consignments, allowing better and sharper decisions.
Some of the major transformational benefits of intelligent automation in the logistics domain are –
- Competitive advantage: Intelligent automation is a differentiator in the logistics industry that sets a business ahead of the competition in an ever-changing business landscape. It helps enterprises adapt to change, optimize operations, and deliver superior service.
- Higher customer satisfaction: Faster data processing for consignment deliveries enables real-time tracking of goods. It also helps deliver personalized services for a small premium. The resulting accuracy and faster delivery result in higher customer satisfaction.
- Operational cost reduction: It speeds up the paperwork related to consignment movement, such as bill of lading processing and matching. It streamlines processes, facilitates delivering more with the same number of resources, and hence results in significant savings on operational costs.
- Increased process accuracy: Eliminating the data entry and enabling movement of data across core business systems through a process workflow framework results in eliminating errors and rework. It improves the overall data integrity, which is essential for decision-making
- Efficiency improvement: Intelligent automation improves efficiency by automating manual procedures in consignment transport and the corresponding statutory compliance. It streamlines processes and reaps significant efficiency gains.
Intelligent automation for the logistics industry – Important use cases
Some of the intelligent automation use cases for the logistics industry are –
1. Document/bill of lading processing: A shipping consignment requires a number of documents for its transportation to the consignee. Some of them are bill of lading, commercial invoice, packing list, customs declaration, proof of delivery, etc. Each document has a detailed mention of the goods and is issued by different entities. While processing the bill of lading, its details have to be matched with the corresponding documents so that the goods move ahead to the next stage of transportation. Manually processing the bills of lading is an error-prone and time-consuming process. It affects the further stages of processing.
Intelligent automation expedites the document processing across different consignments. The automation benefits include –
- Auto-data extraction: Intelligent automation auto-extracts data from the documents and bills of lading in different paper forms or PDF formats. It improves accuracy by eliminating the errors associated with manual data entry.
- Auto-verification and validation: It verifies and validates the extracted data with respect to the different pre-defined rules and enterprise information bases.
- Bill of lading generation: The enterprise can go beyond paper and generate bills of lading and other documents based on the order. It eliminates errors due to manual handling, reduces effort, and accelerates the process.
- Workflow automation: Intelligent automation has the capability to automate the bill of lading workflows across routing, approvals, exceptions, reducing effort, and accelerating the process. It creates audit trails, which are important for internal and external audit purposes.
- Automated billing cycles: It eliminates the intermittent manual processing and accelerates the bill processing. It reduces overhead and improves cash flow.
- Faster cycle times: Elimination of data entry accelerates the processing of the bills of lading, audit trails ensure internal and external tracking, and adherence to compliance standards.
- Better vendor relationships: Faster processing minimizes disputes between the stakeholders. It helps build strong vendor relationships that further ensure corporate discounts and privileges.
2. Dynamic pricing engines: These engines are critical for logistics enterprises to quote competitive pricing and yet maintain revenue margins. Static pricing models fail to adapt to market fluctuations and demand-supply equations.
Intelligent automation benefits for dynamic pricing are –
- Tuning demand forecasting: It enables proactive pricing adjustment by using existing data, public data, and GPS to forecast demand for different logistics services.
- Proactive market analysis: It analyzes the market data in real-time, including competitor pricing, weather conditions, fuel pricing, etc., to adjust the pricing.
- Optimization of less-than-truck-load capacity: It allows the utilization of the remaining truck capacity along a given route to maximize revenue with the transportation of each consignment.
- Appropriate customer segmentation: It supports segmenting customers based on their behavior, requirements, payment capability, etc., to offer personalized pricing.
- Automated pricing adaptation: It allows adjusting prices based on predefined rules, market conditions, and data to reduce manual intervention.
- Faster scenario simulations: It allows simulating different pricing scenarios to understand their effect on revenue and profit.
- Higher customer responsiveness: It supports the business in adjusting and responding to customers and markets with competitive pricing.
3. Consignment tracking solution: End-to-end consignment visibility is a must-have in dynamic markets. It helps overcome paperwork, allowing for systematic integration of data-driven processes using intelligent automation. It supports real-time consignment visibility from pick-up to delivery.
Intelligent automation-powered consignment tracking offers –
- Real-time tracking: The intelligent automation solution leverages data from GPS and sensors to provide real-time location updates across the multi-modal transportation and warehousing stops.
- Fast status updates: It easily provides the consignment location status updates across the transportation route from pick-up to warehousing to customs and till delivery.
- Accurate times of arrival: It leverages GPS data, traffic patterns, weather conditions, and AI/ML algorithms to inform accurate times of arrival.
- Proactive flags: Intelligent automation can be preconfigured to flag off potential delays, such as heavy traffic, vehicle breakdown, etc., and inform the respective stakeholders.
- Quick customer notifications: It facilitates quick customer notifications about the shipment status and expected time of delivery through different communication channels.
- Deep insights: Intelligent automation can be pre-programmed to generate detailed reports and insights on key KPIs, such as delivery performance, exception rates, etc., for optimizing operations.
- Seamless integration: Intelligent automation seamlessly integrates with different enterprise systems, such as transportation management systems, warehouse management systems, etc., for complete consignment visibility.
Intelligent automation for logistics – An implementation roadmap
The logistics domain is more process-intensive than other industries. A strategic and program management-led approach works best while adopting new technology across the enterprise. The main milestones of the implementation roadmap are –
- Define the program goals and objectives: The logistics enterprises must start by identifying business pain points, bottlenecks, and operational inefficiencies to define the program scope. Having measurable and time-bound program goals helps to define the business goals and calculate the return on investment. Listing out the objectives enables the business to prioritize the automation use cases and jumpstart with a pilot that can be quickly scaled up.
- Analyze technology and data readiness: Intelligent automation makes holistic use of the existing infrastructure and data siloes. However, the data ingested and spewed out of the systems should be in the correct format and of the right quality. It is binding on the business to assess the existing infrastructure, their data input and output, availability of data in a structured format, and in-house analytics capabilities. It is important to identify the points of integration between the intelligent automation solution and the existing technology infrastructure.
- Set up an intelligent automation core team: The business needs to secure buy-ins from the heads of departments across the enterprise and set up a core team comprising diverse roles, such as engineers, operations managers, analysts, and data scientists. Subsequently, charting a detailed strategy and program plan is important. The core team is responsible for evangelizing the program benefits, addressing the employee concerns, and ensuring faster adoption and roll-out.
- Partner with the vendor experts: The enterprise must engage intelligent automation experts based on their solution capabilities, scalability of the solution, and after-sales support. The enterprise can start with a proof-of-value (PoV) from the expert before onboarding. The solutions should scale up as per the business requirements and quickly adapt to the evolving business landscape.
- Start small and then scale: By beginning with a small PoV in each function, the heads of the departments get a clear idea of the flexibility and agility of the solution. Subsequently, the logistics business functions can build minimum viable solutions and release them with an iterative approach. Well-defined KPIs help with precision monitoring of the solution impact and also enable RoI calculation.
- Establish a culture of continuous improvement: Intelligent automation delivers sophistication based on the underlying AI/ML models. As the solutions handle more and more batch processes, tasks, and exceptions, the algorithms auto-learn and deliver better performance outcomes in the subsequent batches. Logistics enterprises should empower their business functions to progressively leverage intelligent automation solutions for data-driven decision-making and enlist new use cases for automation.
Simply put
Traditional and manual operations that are used to deliver modern-day work expectations in the logistics business landscape create impediments for enterprises to move ahead with agility and flexibility, which are necessary to stay ahead. Intelligent automation solutions offer a clear path to improve speed, enhance business productivity and efficiency, reduce operational costs, optimize revenue margins, and stay competitive. In a dynamic logistics business environment, the leadership teams should understand the need of the hour to navigate the supply chain complexities, aided by technology solutions. Fostering a culture of innovation and growth enables businesses to tap new business opportunities and gain a competitive edge.
