Logistics / Contract logistics
DHL Supply Chain: Automating transport contact and booking
- Company
- DHL Supply Chain
- Country
- Germany
- Adoption stage
- In operation
- Source published
- Date basis
- The date the source was published. It can differ from the date adoption started.
- How the source was checked
- Read the full source text
The work problem
DHL Supply Chain handled contact between carriers, drivers and warehouses by phone and email. Typical examples are booking arrival times, follow-up calls to drivers and high-priority contact with warehouses. Manual data entry and formulaic contact repeated over and over and used up a lot of staff time.
Technology and data
The company brought in AI agents from HappyRobot. These agents handle phone and email conversations on their own. The HappyRobot platform converses by phone, email and message while linking directly to DHL's internal systems. A single AI task orchestration layer tying together email, WhatsApp and SMS was built so that the process recovers when something goes wrong midway. Staff step out of repetitive work and concentrate on strategic work and exception handling. DHL Supply Chain said it has spent more than 18 months finding and validating operational tasks where generative AI and agentic AI can be used.
Results
The company said it is already in use across several regions and several tasks. The current scope covers several hundred thousand emails and several million minutes of voice calls a year. DHL explained that manual work fell sharply and response speed rose. Chief Information Officer Sally Miller said the purpose is to automate repetitive, time-consuming work so customers get processing efficiency and staff get a more worthwhile role.
Limits and open questions
The figures disclosed are the volume of work covered. Figures for time and cost actually saved and for handling accuracy are not in this source.
Sources
Compiled from public sources. These are not results from ATF Works customers.