Increasing Efficiency in Cold Chain Logistics: Thermotraffic Focuses on Digitalization and Automation

300 employees, 600 thermo and refrigerated vehicles, and over 50 container chassis – at Thermotraffic, the administrative tasks in land and sea transport, air freight, and container trucking are enormous. Therefore, a forwarding software must support the organization of global logistics concepts for temperature-controlled goods in both the food and non-food sectors. With Winsped, Cargosoft, and Maxflex, the logistics service provider is using three systems that, as IT Manager Thorsten Schulte describes, ideally map out our very different requirements for the individual modes of transport due to their specific core competencies in the industry.

“They ideally represent our very different requirements for the individual modes of transport due to their specific industry core competencies.”

The challenges to the company's IT management are also so great because the broad range of services in temperature-controlled logistics has led to strong growth at Thermotraffic in recent years.

“Our different business sectors are structured in a profit center-like manner. Our actions always focus on the customer, to whom we offer individual and tailored solutions even for complex orders,” explains Thorsten Schulte in the trees.

Innovative and holistic concepts are in demand

The company must not only face industry-specific challenges such as increasing competition in international markets, the standardization of technical and legal frameworks, subcontractor billing, or changing customer requirements regarding price, time, quality, and sustainable environmental compatibility.

“Measures aimed solely at optimizing the transport sector have long been insufficient to meet the demands for comprehensive efficiency improvements in work processes. Above all, the importance of automating and digitalizing administrative processes as an increasingly important competitive factor demands new, innovative, and holistic logistics concepts from us.”

IT structures at Thermotraffic must illustrate and connect many different transport processes. | Image: Thermotraffic

Monthly, Thermotraffic processes around 40,000 forwarding orders, generating over 30,000 emails from customer inquiry to invoicing, as well as a total of about 20,000 incoming and outgoing documents – with an upward trend.

Thorsten Schulte in the trees further states:

“Manually capturing, processing, and controlling this large number and diversity of documents was not very transparent and generated a large amount of paper. In addition, compliant archiving required considerable effort and was therefore no longer economically feasible.”

After an extensive market analysis, the decision was made to introduce a professional archiving and document management solution and to connect it to the existing industry and financial accounting programs, so that all documents can be archived in an integrated manner in one system in the future.

For the complex IT project, the transport and logistics service provider ultimately commissioned Visionice from Villingen-Schwenningen—crucial for Thorsten Schulte in the trees was the comprehensive product and service strategy, which integrated not only the system house's own solutions but also products from Easy Software.

Additionally, with the help of the software Transflow developed by Visionice, a fully digital workflow for the freight-specific subcontractor billing was to be realized. Thermotraffic aimed to automate business processes company-wide and thereby standardize and accelerate them.

Software should minimize administrative effort. Particularly, the multifaceted subcontractor business with stationary and demand-dependent contractors poses a logistical challenge due to the lack of standardized communication, inconsistent paper and file formats, or the use of different platforms not only for disposition.

"Even the administrative processes in our previous manual control and billing of freight orders with around 500 incoming invoices daily, as well as order-related (external) documents such as freight papers, delivery notes, customs documents or insurance notifications, toll receipts, telematics data, weight and temperature proofs, or billing over tires and cleaning were very time- and personnel-intensive and therefore cost-intensive, moreover often redundant and error-prone," describes Thorsten Schulte in the trees.

"A lot of work for the responsible clerks until an incoming invoice from the commissioned freight carrier was converted into an outgoing invoice for our customer."

As part of a continuous optimization process, a digital incoming invoice workflow for the subcontractor billing was defined under the keyword 'Automation and Digitalization' in close coordination with the responsible parties at Thermotraffic using the Visionice software Transflow, and gradually implemented in the 25 departments.

600 thermo and refrigerated vehicles are on the road for the cooling logistician. | Image: Thermotraffic

Receipt reader captures the documents

Around 90 percent of the document flow from email or mail receipt to financial accounting is now automated. Incoming invoices first go through an automatic document recognition via a high-performance scanning process: The receipt reader captures the documents, recognizes individual parameters independently of the paper or file format, and extracts the necessary information.

Subsequently, there is a formal and content check of all invoice components such as addresses, tour numbers, prices, reconciliation with conditions, or manual agreements, legal and tax regulations, and much more. Rejected documents, in this case, faulty or unreadable receipts, are sent to the clerk or directly to the subcontractor by email for review.

Visionice Transflow was developed under the leadership of project manager Tobias Menzel, based on his many years of expertise in the freight forwarding industry, and tailored precisely to the highly complex processes of subcontractor invoicing.

"In the software's digital incoming invoice workflow, the enormous variety and number of all 30 approval factors necessary for invoice release are thoroughly checked within seconds - fully automatic and payment-capable. This significantly reduces the throughput time for the user and simultaneously improves the processing quality," Menzel explains the process.

The invoices to be processed are transferred to the document management system of Easy Software, checked automatically, and from there provided for booking in Winsped and financial accounting via interfaces developed by Visionice.

Formal and content errors in the invoices are automatically detected and displayed to the user, who can then decide how to proceed with the erroneous invoice. In the event of an invoice rejection, this is also done automatically.

The email archiving solution Visionice MPX, specifically designed for Microsoft Exchange, has been in productive use in all departments at Thermotraffic since 2019, and the document management of Easy Software AG, as well as the software integration with Winsped and financial accounting, have also been successfully implemented.

Currently, the Black Forest system house is expanding the digital workflow to include accompanying documents and harmonizing it with the processes for incoming invoices. The next step is to establish interfaces to Cargosoft and Maxflex.

Thorsten Schulte in the Bäumen draws a final conclusion:

"Despite the short period of use, Visionice has established itself as a central IT instrument in our company. The digital access has led to a cross-departmental continuity of the workflow and the acceleration of document flow.

In addition to time savings, less search effort, or significantly reduced paper consumption, we benefit above all from quality, transparency, and traceability in document auditing."