How Hellmann Automated Their 4PL Control Tower with AI

The Challenge

What They Were Dealing With

Hellmann's 4PL control tower operations received daily document bundles from suppliers — commercial invoices, airway bills, packing lists, customs compliance forms — often packaged as PDFs of 200–300 pages per batch. Two operators each spent 2–3 hours per morning manually downloading, splitting, reading, and re-keying data into spreadsheets before it could be entered into CargoWise. The manual process followed a rigid sequence: download email attachments, split multi-hundred-page PDFs into individual documents, identify document type, extract relevant fields, enter data into spreadsheets, and finally re-key everything into CargoWise. New suppliers required 1–3 weeks of engineering effort to map their document formats into the existing workflow. During peak season, document processing backlogs regularly exceeded 24+ hours, delaying downstream operations and creating compliance risk. The entire process lacked any audit trail — there was no systematic record of what was processed, when, or by whom, making error investigation and compliance reporting extremely difficult.

• Daily document bundles of 200-300 pages (invoices, AWBs, packing lists, customs forms)
• 2-3 hours per morning per operator on manual download, split, read, re-key workflow
• Rigid sequential process: download → split PDFs → identify doc type → extract → spreadsheet → re-key into CargoWise
• New suppliers required 1-3 weeks engineering effort per format
• Peak season backlogs exceeded 24+ hours, delaying downstream ops
• No audit trail — no record of what was processed, when, or by whom