Xion Technologies

CASE STUDY · LOGISTICS

How a logistics company cut its manual workload by nearly 80%

The story behind the number on our homepage: what was automated, how the hours were counted, and what deliberately stayed human. The company stays anonymous — the method doesn't.

The company moves freight between Canada, the USA and Latin America — a 25-year operation with a small administrative team and a paper-heavy day: quotes, bookings, invoices, customs documents, status emails, and a weekly report that ate a Friday.

Every shipment meant the same information typed into more than one system, the same documents assembled and sent by hand, and the same routine questions answered one email at a time — all against the day's cut-offs.

Behind the number: an administrative team of six, working between email, spreadsheets and the company's operations system, on several hundred shipments a month.

MEASURED RESULTS

~80% less manual work across the automated processes, measured against the baseline
30+ hours returned to the team every week
4 processes automated, one measured pilot at a time

What was automated

  • Document workflows

    Shipping documents generated from data already in the system, filed by rule and sent on the trigger the team defined — instead of assembled by hand for every shipment.

    BEFORE ~14 H/WEEK → AFTER ~3 H/WEEK

  • Data entry from emails and PDFs

    Shipment details arriving by email or PDF are extracted, validated against rules and pushed to the systems that need them. The same number is never typed twice.

    BEFORE ~12 H/WEEK → AFTER ~2 H/WEEK

  • Recurring reports

    The weekly operations report assembles itself from the real sources, on schedule. The team reviews it instead of building it.

    BEFORE ~6 H/WEEK → AFTER ~1 H/WEEK

  • Routine email replies

    AI drafts the routine answers — status requests, document requests — and a person reviews and sends. Nothing leaves the company unread.

    BEFORE ~10 H/WEEK → AFTER ~3 H/WEEK

THE BASELINE

How the ~80% was measured

Before automating anything, we counted hours per process per week over four weeks of normal operation. That count is the baseline — without one, any percentage is marketing.

After each rollout, the same count was repeated on the live process. The ~80% is the measured difference across the automated processes. Not a projection, not a vendor benchmark — a before and an after, in hours.

What was not automated

The line between system work and human work was drawn on purpose — and it is the part clients ask about most:

  • Anything a client feels

    Pricing, negotiation and difficult conversations stayed with people. The AI drafts; it does not decide.

  • Exceptions

    Anything ambiguous routes to a person with full context. The system never guesses silently.

  • The final check

    Documents and replies pass a human review before leaving the company — the HUMAN REVIEW box in our diagram is not decoration.

Your operation has its own version of this.

Walk us through one process — we will tell you honestly whether the numbers would justify it.

Book a discovery call