Damco printed a Bill of Lading for every load, then went hunting through the tray when the truck showed up. We replaced the pile with a scan: AI reads the document, the gate finds it in a second, and the driver signs on screen.
Illustration of software we built for this client; names and figures in the UI are changed.
Case study — not affiliated with or endorsed by Maersk. Maersk and Damco are trademarks of A.P. Møller - Mærsk A/S.
Every load leaving a Damco depot needed a Bill of Lading on paper — proof the shipment left, proof for the carrier of where it came from. So the printer ran all day and the tray filled up. Hundreds of near-identical pages a week, stacked in the order they happened to come out.
A driver pulls into the gate and needs his paperwork signed. Somewhere in that stack is his BOL. Someone walks to the tray and starts flipping. Minutes pass with a truck idling at the gate — and when the page can't be found, it gets reprinted and the pile grows again.
Instead of printing, a depot drops a whole batch of BOL PDFs in at once. A custom model on Google Cloud walks each page — OCR plus a model trained on every document type Damco actually uses — and boxes what it recognises: BOL number, carrier name, delivery address, PO and seal. Those fields become the index the second the batch lands.
Now when the truck arrives, nobody walks to a tray. Staff type the PO or the carrier into the gate terminal and the right shipment comes back immediately. The four minutes of flipping through paper became one search box and about a second.
The driver signs right there on the device — no clipboard, no pen chasing, no per-envelope fee to an e-signature vendor. The moment he lifts his finger, the document is sealed cryptographically: the timestamp, the IP, and the location of the gate go on the record with the signature.
That single signature fans out. A paper copy prints at the depot for the driver who still wants one in the cab. A digital copy is archived and searchable forever. And a copy goes straight to the carrier — no envelope, no follow-up call asking where the paperwork went.
Paper failed at the handoff: the page existed, but nobody could find it while a truck sat at the gate. The platform works because the document is read once and indexed forever — so the depot stops printing, the gate stops digging, and the signature reaches everyone who needs it.
The BOL is scanned instead of printed. OCR and a model trained on Damco's own document types read it and file an indexed record — no page joins the pile.
Type the PO into the gate terminal and the shipment comes back in about a second. No walk to the tray, no flipping, no reprint when a page goes missing.
Sign on the screen at the gate. A copy still prints at the depot for anyone who wants paper in the cab — the difference is it's already signed.
The signed copy reaches the carrier automatically, the archive stays searchable, and yard movement finally shows up as data instead of paper.
To find a shipment at the gate, down from about four minutes of flipping through a tray.
Copies from one signature: printed for the driver, archived digitally, sent to the carrier.
Pages printed before a truck arrives — and no per-signature fee to an e-signature vendor.
> The tray is empty. Nobody misses it. <
We count 48 working weeks a year and assume a fifth of the work stays with a person — checks and exceptions. Conservative on purpose.
That's $43,008 a year to have people do robot work. Automate it and about $34,406 of that comes off the wage bill every year — plus 26 hours a week your team spends on growing the business instead.
Each bar = $2,000 of manual costTell us which document your team searches for most. We'll show you what Damco saw — what it takes to read it once, index it, and never flip through a tray again.