Industry
Logistics earns its money on the standard process and loses it on exceptions handled by email
The AI Business Center Foundation (AIBC) is a think tank and advisory partner that helps the boards of construction, industrial and technical-services companies adopt artificial intelligence so that it delivers measurable results and builds competitive advantage. In logistics we start with exception handling.
Automated racking is no longer enough. The dispatcher’s inbox has become the bottleneck
Logistics centres and warehouses move goods automatically, but people handle the exceptions: rescheduled delivery bookings, discrepancies in documents, damage, carrier delays, customer questions about status. Every exception means correspondence, a phone call and data retyped into a system by hand.
How cost and risk arise
- data from transport documents retyped by hand into the warehouse and transport systems,
- exceptions handled in email, with no history available to the shift that takes over,
- replies to customers that depend on who happens to pick up the case,
- rules for handling exceptions held in the dispatchers’ experience, not in procedures.
The first step
One frequent type of exception, for example a rescheduled delivery booking or a mismatch between a document and the delivery. We describe how it is handled, the decision rules and the input data, measure the time and the number of manual operations, and then specify a pilot in which the model drafts the first response and a person approves it.
What the Foundation does
- 30-day readiness assessment: a list of exceptions by frequency and cost, pilot specification.
- Semantic transformation, that is, organising a company’s names, processes and data so that people, language models and board reports understand them the same way: a vocabulary of statuses and exceptions shared by the warehouse, transport and customer service.
- GenAI competence: programmes for dispatchers, customer service and shift managers.
- AI value report for the board: exception handling time, manual operations, data errors.
Frequently asked questions
Where in logistics does AI deliver results fastest?
In handling exceptions and documents: classifying incoming cases and giving the first response, extracting data from transport documents into the systems, and preparing replies to customers about shipment status. People approve the exceptions instead of processing everything by hand.
Does the WMS or TMS have to be replaced?
Usually not at the outset. We first describe the exception process and the data that move between systems by hand. Only that description shows whether an integration is enough or whether the system needs to change.
How should the effect be measured in logistics?
By the time from the report of an exception to a decision, the number of documents retyped by hand, the number of customer queries about status and the number of errors in transport data, measured before and after on data from the logistics operator's systems.
Let’s start with an assessment
Let’s talk about the exception that most often holds up your shift.