Digitalization in the Freight Forwarding Industry: When Email Scheduling Reaches Its Limits
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“Digitalization in logistics” sounds like autonomous trucks, blockchain, and a fully connected supply chain. In most freight forwarding companies, it looks different. It starts at a desk, where a dispatcher types out a shipping order from an email, looks up the price in an Excel spreadsheet, and calls three carriers one after another. It’s here—not in some vision of the future—that it’s decided whether a company operates digitally or merely possesses digital tools.
This article is intended for freight forwarders and logistics service providers who feel that their email-based scheduling is reaching its limits and want to understand what digitalization specifically means for their operations before they even start talking about software. It deliberately focuses on the operational perspective, rather than on technology buzzwords.
What “Digitalization in Logistics” Really Means for a Freight Forwarding Company
Major studies and position papers on digitalization in logistics paint a picture of the future: sensors, AI, autonomous vehicles, and fully connected supply chains. That’s not wrong, but it’s rarely where a medium-sized freight forwarding company stands. For them, digitalization first and foremost means something unspectacular: mapping daily operations in software so that information no longer has to be transferred manually from one system to the next.
The difference is important. A freight forwarder that uses a modern TMS, an ERP system, and several apps has digital tools. It only operates digitally when an order moves from receipt to billing without anyone having to type it out, look it up, or pass it on by shouting. It is precisely this end-to-end continuity—not the number of tools—that is the key. “Logistics 4.0” is the long-term goal; the end-to-end operational chain is the first step toward it.
How to Tell When Your Email Inbox Is Reaching Its Limit
Email-based scheduling is surprisingly resilient. It often keeps a business running for years and generates many millions in revenue because experienced schedulers keep it together through a combination of knowledge and improvisation. Its limits aren’t revealed by a sudden collapse, but rather by symptoms that gradually worsen:
- It takes new employees months before they can manage their own schedules, because the knowledge is in people's heads, not in systems.
- If a key person is absent, operations come to a standstill because no one else knows their rates, contacts, or special cases.
- The sales department cannot provide customers with a status update without calling the planning department.
- Errors caused by duplicate entries and outdated Excel data are becoming more frequent, especially under heavy load.
- Growth means more staff, not higher margins, because every additional order requires the same amount of manual work.
None of these symptoms alone necessitates action. Taken together, they describe an organization whose performance depends on its people rather than its systems. We explain how this dependence on individuals—rather than on systems—arises in the article on SaaS Proliferation described.
A typical scenario: A freight forwarding company with 120 employees and steady growth realizes that every additional metric ton of revenue requires half a new back-office position. The reason isn’t that people are slow; it’s the same old process every time an order goes through—via email, Excel, and verbal instructions. That’s the moment when digital transformation shifts from being a topic for the future to a business imperative.
The Cost of Manual Coordination
The cost of email provision is not listed on any invoice because it is spread across salaries. It can still be quantified, however. Use your own figures; the following are a model, not a benchmark.
Take order entry from emails, for example. If two clerks each spend 15 hours per week on this, at a full cost of 50 EUR and 46 work weeks, that amounts to 2 × 15 × 46 × 50 = 69,000 EUR per year—for a single sub-step, before even factoring in price research, carrier coordination, and status verification are even factored in.
Important: This is a theoretical gross potential, not an actual savings amount. Some of this work does not disappear; it simply shifts from routine tasks to exceptions. Only a process assessment will reveal how much is actually saved. The point is the scale: Even a single manual step can easily tie up slightly more than one full-time position at a medium-sized freight forwarding company.
Where Digitalization Pays Off First in the Freight Forwarding Industry
It’s very tempting to take a broad approach to digitalization: a new portal for customers, an app for drivers, a dashboard for management—all at once. In practice, however, the opposite approach pays off. Start where manual coordination is most costly—and in almost every freight forwarding company, that’s the dispatch department: the journey of an order from receipt through assignment to status.
Specifically, there are four areas where digitization makes an immediate impact: the automatic capture of orders from emails, accessible pricing information instead of Excel spreadsheets, a structured carrier history instead of relying on memory, and a status that the sales team can view directly. These aren’t technologies of the future. It’s the digitization of day-to-day business.
Here’s an example of what this actually changes: Today, a clerk reads an order email, manually enters the sender, cargo, dates, and price into the TMS, and files the email in a folder. When digitized, the system reads the email, creates the order in a structured format, and immediately shows the dispatcher the appropriate carriers along with their history. What used to take five minutes per order to enter now takes just seconds to review. Multiplied by the number of daily orders, that’s the difference between a growing business and a back office that’s constantly struggling to keep up.
The article explains the role that the transportation management system plays in this process TMS software and the Dispo layer on top of it; what is particularly important in scheduling—see the article on Scheduling Software for Freight Forwarding Companies.
Digitalization doesn't mean replacing everything
A common misconception is holding companies back: the idea that digitalization means replacing their tried-and-true TMS and starting from scratch. The opposite is usually true. Your TMS handles transportation and billing well, and standard freight forwarding software reliably maps out the standard process. What’s missing is rarely a new, large-scale system. It’s the seamless connection between what’s already in place and the integration of your company’s own logic, which currently resides in email and Excel.
Digitalization in the freight forwarding industry therefore means supplementing rather than replacing: adding a lean operational layer on top of existing systems that handles manual coordination. Our page on this topic shows what such a layer looks like: Operations Platforms for Freight Forwarders. The fact that digital tools can proliferate unchecked over the years, rather than simplifying things, is the other side of the same coin.
Three Misconceptions That Hold Freight Forwarders Back
Three assumptions keep companies using email scheduling longer than is good for them.
"First, we need a digital strategy." A strategy on paper often just delays taking the first step. It’s more useful to digitize a single, costly process, demonstrate its impact, and learn from it. The strategy emerges from what works.
"Digitalization is only worthwhile for companies of a certain size." For small and medium-sized businesses, the opposite is true. The manual effort increases with every order, which is why a growing freight forwarding company feels the strain sooner than a large corporation with its own IT department. Companies that grow pay the price for this gap every day.
"In the end, we'll have to rebuild everything anyway." Rarely. The existing TMS generally remains the primary system. The layer above it—which currently consists of people, emails, and Excel—is being digitized.
How this affects your dispatchers
The greatest impact is rarely reflected in a single metric. It’s evident in the people. A dispatcher who no longer has to type up orders or call carriers has the mental bandwidth to focus on the decisions that no one else can make for them: the tricky route, the last-minute bottleneck, the customer with a special request. Digitization relieves the dispatcher of routine tasks, not of responsibility. And it makes the company less dependent on individual employees, because knowledge that was previously held only by an experienced dispatcher becomes accessible within the system. That is precisely the difference between a company that grows with its people and one that is dependent on them.
Where to Start
Digital transformation rarely fails because of the technology; it almost always fails because it’s approached on too grand a scale. A pragmatic start doesn’t require a strategy document. One measurement is enough. Take a single process chain—such as order entry—and have someone track exactly how much time it actually takes for a week. That number is your starting point.
This is followed by the approach we recommend even outside the field of logistics: fully digitize one process, stabilize it, and then move on to the next. The article describes what this step-by-step approach generally looks like Digital Transformation in the Workplace, Step by Step. And to learn how to lead the rollout without overburdening your team, check out the article on Change Management in Digital Transformation.
What to do now
Don't start with a vision; start with a week of observation. Where is a date being entered manually a second time? Where does a decision depend on the experience of a single person? Each of these areas is a candidate for the first step, and none of them requires overhauling operations all at once.
Connected logistics remains the long-term goal. The first step toward achieving it is to move day-to-day operations away from email and Excel. If you’d like to see what that looks like in practice for a freight forwarding company of your size, visit our page at Operations Platforms for Freight Forwarders, or you Schedule a call.
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