The situation
The operations team at a mid-sized Singapore freight forwarder was spending the majority of their working day on tasks that required no judgement: pulling shipment status updates from carrier portals, copying data into customer emails, chasing vendors for ETAs, and compiling weekly performance reports from five different spreadsheets.
Each operations manager was spending an estimated 3.2 hours per day on these tasks. With seven managers, that was 22 hours of senior operational capacity lost every day to copy-paste work.
The company had purchased a ChatGPT Enterprise licence six months earlier. Nobody was using it in a structured way.
What we did
- 01
Spent week one embedded with the operations team, documenting every workflow step-by-step. We found 23 distinct manual touchpoints across the shipment lifecycle.
- 02
Scored each touchpoint against our AI opportunity framework: impact, feasibility, and implementation speed. Identified four high-priority workflows for immediate redesign.
- 03
Redesigned and deployed two workflows in weeks three and four: (1) automated shipment status aggregation and customer email generation, (2) AI-assisted vendor communication and ETA tracking.
- 04
Ran three training sessions with the operations team, including a role-specific playbook for each manager. Tracked adoption daily for the first two weeks post-deployment.