“I realised immediately that Qargo could help us visualise complex logistical challenges.”
The key to Dutch transportation company Kisjes’s longterm success has been its ability to meet the highly specialised and evolving needs of its clients – but its TMS platform was struggling to deliver the flexibility the company increasingly required.
Netherlands-based Kisjes's primary business is delivering unique, logistically-challenging loads such as electrical transformers and festival equipment. To ensure continued success, utilising a TMS platform capable of addressing Kisjes’s clients’ evolving needs was essential.
However, in 2023, the company’s then-new business transformation manager, Nancy Salem, assessed Kisjes’s existing TMS solution and concluded that it wasn’t delivering the right level of functionality. “To be clear, our previous TMS was a very good system,” says Nancy. “However, for our needs, it simply wasn’t flexible enough.”
For instance, Kisjes regularly delivers to sites that don’t have physical addresses and planners often need to re-plan schedules through out the day. “Ultimately, we needed a TMS system that could manage such challenges effortlessly,” explains Nancy.
First contact
The need for a more agile solution triggered a search for an all-new TMS platform. Qargo’s offering had already caught Nancy’s attention at an expo in 2023: “On its stand, Qargo was displaying dashboards that clearly demonstrated the platform knew how to visualise complex data in a simple format.”
It’s why she invited Qargo to demo its system alongside several other providers later in the year. Again, Nancy found that Qargo’s visualisations stood out from the rest: “The other providers’ systems offered visualisations that didn’t match Qargo’s. To be honest, I just didn’t feel it with any of them.”
Testing times
To confirm her view, Nancy organised a second demo but now with all of Kisjes’s department heads present. Whether planners or administrators, each and every stakeholder was left impressed by Qargo’s offering. However, Nancy knew that a significant change to how Kisjes’s operations were run could jeopardise business continuity with any potential disruption harming client relations.
It’s why she asked for a one-week trial period so Kisjes could take a deep-dive into Qargo’s capabilities. “The Qargo team created a sandbox environment for us to test,” recalls Nancy. “We used it to run dummy orders, stress-testing the platform to ensure it could deliver the unique functionality that we needed.”
Once the trial period was over, a vote was held among all of Kisjes’s stakeholders on whether to proceed with Qargo. The result? A unanimous yes.
“The trial period built trust in Qargo’s offering across our company.”
In parallel
However, making an immediate change to the system that underpins Kisjes’s entire operations wasn’t something Nancy was prepared to do. “I didn’t want to throw a switch on day one and see what happened,” she explains. “Instead, the switchover needed to be undetectable to our clients and I believed the best way to achieve this was to have Qargo and our existing platform running side by side initially.”
Acting as the old system’s ‘shadow’, Qargo was subsequently set up to reproduce the planning of real-world jobs day-to-day in the background alongside the existing TMS platform. This enabled Nancy and the Kisjes team to monitor and measure Qargo’s performance against the legacy system and identify any issues before going fully live.
Going live
The trial period ended successfully with Nancy and the rest of the Kisjes team now confident that Qargo could deliver on its potential. For the ‘go live’ date in February this year, Qargo personnel were sent to the company’s two sites to ensure a smooth rollout. “The rollout was successful with nearly all clients not noticing the switchover,” says Nancy.
Importantly, Qargo’s introduction has already begun delivering exceptional results across several key areas. These range from combining multiple orders from different clients into a single trip to stripping back the busywork of manual data inputting and adjusting. Nancy also highlights the ease of creating planning as well as monitoring load and unload times.
The visualisations that attracted Nancy’s attention to the platform in the first place remain as vital as ever. “You have the text you need to identify all deliveries underway,” she explains. “Crucially, you also have colour coding that lets you monitor journey progressions at a glance.”
Rich features
Clients are also benefiting from Qargo’s rich functionality, for instance, its ability to let Kisjes’s drivers upload pictures of their deliveries. Because of the unique locations the company delivers to, recipients aren’t always onsite to sign off on the delivery. Nancy explains: “Our drivers can now take the proof of delivery pictures and upload them in an instant so the client can see that their order is ready and waiting for them.”
Another key feature becoming increasingly important to Dutch companies is the tracking of carbon emissions. “With our old system, we couldn’t capture any ‘green’ data,” says Nancy. “With Qargo though, we can see exactly how many kilometres we have covered and can deliver that crucial data straight to our customers for their CO2 records.”
Future assured
Such a depth and breadth of functionality highlights why Nancy believes Qargo’s offering is not only the right fit for Kisjes’s current operations – but for its future as well: “From working with the platform – and most importantly, the team – I know Qargo is flexible and agile enough.
“That’s really important especially in the Netherlands as it’s a little behind with data analytics in the transport sector but the landscape is changing rapidly. By using Qargo, we are now in the best possible position to meet any demands for new data sets and metrics as well as deliver constantly cutting edge services to our customers – no matter how our industry evolves in the future.”
“I’m excited to see what comes next from Qargo because this is just the beginning.”
