From Paperwork to Productivity: How AI Automation Transformed a Global Supply Chain

DB Schenker Partners with amazee.ai to Automate Daily Processes

DB Schenker (DBS) is one of the world’s largest logistics and supply chain providers. From customs clearance and brokerage to trade show logistics and shipping coordination, the company’s systems process thousands of transactions every day. In this industry, small inefficiencies like paperwork delays or misrouted communications can result in costly bottlenecks.

DBS’s longtime IT partner, Qdos, turned to amazee.ai looking for an enterprise-secure AI solution. Together, they developed a three-phase rollout that targeted DBS’s most pressing problems: email overload, hard-coded exception handling, and static report generation.

Three Pile-Ups: Email, Paperwork, and Reports

DB Schenker’s customs system, built entirely in Drupal, was inundated with hundreds of emails every day: “everything from remittance advice, proofs of payment, and document requests to simple queries and even automatic out-of-office replies,” says David Hasell, the web development manager at Qdos. Each message had to be manually opened, classified, and redirected, which drained staff time and slowed responses.

Beyond the inbox, inefficiencies multiplied. Every shipping client had its own requirements: according to David, DBS “was mapping out loads of rules specific to each customer, one exception after another.” They had built up a maze of isolated configurations over the years.

And while DBS was collecting valuable operational data for everything from carbon emissions to punctuality rates, turning that information into usable insights was slow and cumbersome. Reports had to be manually compiled and formatted from multiple sources, producing static PDFs that took days to prepare. Teams couldn’t easily adapt them to highlight emerging issues like sustainability or service delays, limiting their ability to provide timely, data-driven updates to clients. “We’d built up a dashboard of statistics, but what the business really needed was an easy way to turn those into client-ready reports,” recalls David.

AI-Powered Problem-Solving

With an initial goal of freeing team members from the menial grind of manually checking email features, amazee.ai worked with David and the Qdos team to build an intelligent email triage solution. The system analyzes each incoming message to categorize it and provide an AI-generated summary of the content to help team members respond more efficiently, so it would land in the right inbox for an immediate response. And if the email asks for something automatable like a document fetch, a team member wouldn’t need to do more than double-check the attachment before hitting Reply.

For client-specific workflows, amazee.ai enabled a dynamic business rules engine: “We gave them an interface where they can add a business rule in plain English”, says David. The AI interprets these instructions, routes documents accordingly, and falls back to a default workflow when none of the rules apply. This change gave DBS the flexibility to handle exceptions in minutes rather than weeks, no matter the size of the client.

Finally, amazee.ai addressed the reporting bottleneck. The new reporting interface uses prompts to generate tailored PDFs, complete with charts and visualizations. Staff can refine reports in real time through a conversational interface, whether that means shifting the focus to sustainability, comparing data across events, or adding a new graph on demand.

Efficiency Gains, Empowerment, and Easy Evaluation

The DBS team reclaimed hours of wasted time each week by clearing out the technical debt accrued across multiple platforms and layers of customizations. What began as a search for efficiency grew into empowerment: the customizable interfaces allow employees to enable bespoke workflows without bespoke work to build them. And since the AI can adapt to additional prompts, even the automatic reports can be rebuilt in real time.

“Each of the interfaces feels conversational, looks really nice, and saves right within existing systems”, says David. That means the DBS team can get on with their work instead of remaining bogged down in manual tasks.

A Team that Gets its Time Back

By eliminating manual drags on their time, Qdos and amazee.ai helped DBS teams work faster, smarter, and with more control. DBS has reclaimed hours once lost to sorting emails, coding rules, and compiling reports. With processes unblocked, the team isn’t just catching up, they’re moving forward with the capacity to evolve as new needs arise.