Freight forwarding operations archive (UK and EU)

Booking emails, carrier negotiations, exception handling and milestone records from five years of road and sea freight forwarding between the UK and EU.

Each shipment in this archive can be followed from the first quote request to proof of delivery. Our operations team worked these jobs through shared Outlook mailboxes and WhatsApp groups with hauliers, so the conversations are messy in the way real desk work tends to be. A shipment table in Excel and SharePoint ties it together using the job reference. Five years brings in some useful changes of circumstance. Brexit customs procedures arrive in January 2021, and you can watch the paperwork and query volume change. Later periods include Red Sea rerouting and the resulting carrier rate disputes. Reference matching works for about 87 percent of emails. The remainder sits in an unlinked folder, because staff sometimes dropped the reference from the subject line. WhatsApp coverage only begins in 2022. Phone calls aren't captured, so some decisions appear in the thread without the discussion behind them.