From pilot to daily order flow at Melle Transport

Melle Transport specialises in road transport for sea containers from the Rotterdam region to national and international destinations. Every transport order needs to be picked up quickly and arrive in the operational system with the correct information.

Container orders arrived in a variety of formats. Order entry was therefore not one fixed action: employees had to identify, check, and enter information in the correct place in Erniesoft’s e-Lips TMS. Differences between orders made this route difficult to automate reliably with traditional fixed templates.

The manual work consumed more than time on each individual order. As order volumes grow, the number of checks and data-entry steps grows with them. Melle therefore wanted to improve the full route from incoming order to usable TMS data instead of merely speeding up one document or field.

Melle Transport and Chainfill began with a focused pilot for container-transport order entry. Starting with a contained scope made it possible to follow the real information flow, from the moment an order arrives until a complete order is available in the existing TMS.

Chainfill reads the incoming order information, brings the relevant data into a consistent structure, and performs the agreed checks. The processed information then continues to e-Lips. Only situations that cannot be handled safely and automatically still require an employee’s judgement.

After the first go-live, the workflow was improved with examples from daily operations. Different formats and exceptions were not kept outside the solution as edge cases; they were used to make processing more robust. The automated route could therefore take over a larger share of the real order flow step by step.

The pilot has therefore become part of the operational way of working. Incoming orders follow a consistent processing route, while situations that cannot be handled safely and automatically are directed to an employee for focused review. The operation retains control without starting every order with manual processing.

The collaboration also extends beyond the first order flow. Melle Transport and Chainfill are discussing which other processes can follow the same approach: start small, learn from exceptions, and expand only after the first workflow operates reliably in daily practice.