Logistics · Partner onboarding
Three expert days, reviewed in twenty minutes.
A major European freight forwarder automated the slow setup work behind connecting a new business partner — without letting the machine make a single decision on its own.
Time to a finished, reviewed setup for one new partner.
Working Definition — one new partner setup
REF NS-01 · SIGNED
Agreed and signed by both sides before any code was written.
- Unit
- one complete setup connecting a new partner's system.
- Owner
- the senior specialist who reviews and approves it.
- Working means
-
- a finished draft ready to review in under 20 minutes
- at least 60% of it correct on the first pass
- zero silent errors — every uncertain point flagged, never guessed
The result
Before any code, both sides signed a target: the first draft would be at least 60% correct. On real data it hit 91%. The rest were business-specific judgment calls flagged for the expert — not machine mistakes.
It never guessed. Zero silent errors — anything the machine was unsure of, it flagged for a human. That is what makes a twenty-minute review safe: nothing wrong slips through quietly.
The problem
Large companies exchange orders, invoices, and shipping documents with their partners automatically, system to system. But every new partner's system speaks a slightly different dialect, so before any of it can run, a senior specialist has to write the translation between the two — hundreds of rules, matched by hand. It takes about three working days per partner, and only a handful of people in the company can do it at all. Their calendars, not the business, set the pace of every new partnership.
What was built
Their system drafts that first translation itself, in minutes, then runs thirteen automated checks before a person ever looks. The specialist's job flips from writing it to checking it — a full draft reviewed in about ten minutes and exported in the team's own format. (The people who do this work call it EDI mapping; you don't need the term to see the shift — expert authoring became expert review.)
A setup that once cost three days of specialist time is now drafted for about three to four dollars of computer time and checked in twenty minutes — the expert hours it replaces cost far more. Delivered end to end in one month.
Under the hood