The challenge
The existing planboard was old, hard to change and entirely dependent on the vendor. Every change to the process meant waiting on an outside party, and every workaround ended in yet another spreadsheet.
Transport orders came in as emails with Excel or PDF attachments, in dozens of formats from shipping lines, forwarders and shippers. The back office retyped them, with double entry and errors as the result. Statuses from the on-board computer, container statuses at the terminals and invoices in Exact each lived in their own system.
Without a single source of truth there was barely any view of what a trip actually cost and earned. Margins per client, per trip and per charter could only be reconstructed after the fact, and then only with a lot of manual work in Excel.
Our approach
- 01
AI order intake from the mailbox
The platform reads the shared order inbox through Microsoft Graph, stores the attachments and has a language model in Azure OpenAI pull out the order data: container, shipping line, terminal, loading and unloading address, references and time windows. A second, smaller model checks the result and flags differences. The planner sees the proposal next to the original email, matches the client and creates the order in one click. Human in the loop, with a full trail from email to order.
- 02
Planboard for own trucks and charters
A new planboard with day and week views for own trucks and charters, filters by terminal and shunt, and status dots per stop that colour according to actual progress. Trips can be split and combined, and empty kilometres between consecutive trips are recorded and charged on according to Cabooter's own allocation rule.
- 03
The on-board computer as the source of truth
Orders go straight to the driver's Transics on-board computer. When the driver presses load, unload or unloading finished, the actual arrival and departure time lands on the right stop and the order moves automatically from planned to in progress to completed. Scanned CMRs and proof-of-delivery documents drop into the file by themselves and can go out with the invoice.
- 04
Portbase and HERE in the flow
Through Portbase Secure Chain the platform tracks release, customs status, terminal availability and the TAR code per import container, live on the order. HERE Maps calculates truck routes with distance, driving time and toll per country for the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany, and geocodes addresses and terminals. Those routes feed both the quotations and the cost price per trip.
- 05
Quotations and rates
Sales builds quotations with multiple lanes and intermediate stops, with the platform taking the cost price from route, toll and carrier rate tiers and setting the sales price on margin or a fixed price. Accepted lanes become standard rates for the client. Credit limits are checked live against the debtor balance in Exact before an order is created.
- 06
Finance closed off, linked to Exact Online
When a trip is completed, the cost and revenue lines are created automatically: trip price, toll, weekly diesel surcharge, waiting hours and chassis rental. Finance sees per order whether the CMR is in, whether the sales and purchase prices have been checked and whether the invoice is ready. Sales invoices, collective invoices, credit notes and charter purchase invoices go to Exact Online as bookings, with weekly carrier statements and Excel exports for reconciliation.
The result
The platform is in production and fully replaces the old planboard. Planning, back office and finance work in one system, with the order as the central file: from the incoming email to the booking in Exact. The automated order entry is calculated to save around 110,000 euro a year, mainly by removing double entry and input errors.
Margins are no longer reconstructed after the fact. Per client, trip and route, costs and revenue are visible as soon as the trip is completed, based on the actual times from the on-board computer. Cabooter is independent of the old vendor and runs the platform in its own Azure tenant, with Entra ID login and roles for planning, back office, finance and administration.
The platform is set up as the foundation for the whole group. On the same codebase we are now building the platforms for Cabooter Rail and Cabooter Global, with shared integrations for Exact, Portbase, HERE and the AI email intake. For Trucking, the driver app is the next step on the roadmap.