I'm not a writer. I run the day shift at our Antwerp DC and the closest thing I have to a publishing schedule is the shift handover log. CargoDuo asked if I'd say a few words about how the Hamburg lane has changed since we switched to their planner last autumn. I said I'd try, on the condition that nobody edits the bits where it didn't go well.
Six months in, we're running four trucks a day on a lane that used to take five. Same customers in Hamburg, same goods coming out of our DC, same delivery windows. Nothing clever. Just better arranged.
The lane in numbers
The Antwerp–Hamburg lane is one of our oldest. Five trucks a day, Monday to Friday, mostly mixed pallets headed for retail DCs around northern Germany. Before CargoDuo, our planner would build the loads in a spreadsheet she'd inherited from the previous planner, who had inherited it from the one before her. The spreadsheet was older than my youngest.
Those numbers are real. They're not a CargoDuo brochure number. We pulled them from our own TMS and our fuel cards and we double-checked them with the lane controller. The 168k is net of the software fee, which our finance team asked me to mention.
What we tried first
I want to be upfront: this wasn't our first try. Over the last decade we tried at least three other things to squeeze more out of this lane. None of them stuck.
- A consultant came in for two weeks in 2018 and built us a model in PowerPoint. The model said we could go from five trucks to four. It did not say how.
- We tried a packing tool from a big TMS vendor in 2021. Nice software. Did not understand which pallets had to come off first at which stop. Our planner stopped using it after a month.
- We ran a “no-mixed-loads” trial in 2023. Worked beautifully on paper. Nearly broke us when one customer's order shifted by two pallets and we couldn't flex.
I mention these because if you're in our shoes, you have probably also tried something and watched it fade. The story I'm telling here isn't “buy software, problem solved.” It's closer to: the fourth thing finally worked, and here's what was different about it.
“With the spreadsheet, I knew the answer before I started. With the new tool, I get suggestions I would never have tried. Some of them are bad. The good ones are really good.”
The week we changed how we plan
We piloted CargoDuo on the Hamburg lane for a week in November. Our planner did every load twice — once in her spreadsheet, once in the new tool — and we built whichever plan she felt better about. By Wednesday she was building the spreadsheet version defensively, just to have something to compare.
On Thursday afternoon CargoDuo suggested a four-truck plan for what would normally have been five. We argued about it for an hour. The argument was useful: it forced us to write down why we thought five was the right number. The reasons turned out to be “that's what we've always done” and “it feels safer.” Neither survived contact with the actual unload sequence.
We dispatched four trucks on Friday. They arrived in Hamburg within the windows. Nobody called us. Our planner went home and didn't look at her email all weekend, which was unusual for her.
The dispatcher-time number surprised us. We expected the trucks-per-day change. We did not expect the planner's morning to shrink from ninety minutes to twenty-five. That change has cascaded — she now has time to handle the exceptions properly, which used to get rushed.
What's different on the floor
I want to talk about the dock crew because that's where new tools go to die. Most of the planning software we've tried over the years made the planner's life better and the floor crew's life worse. The plans came down complicated, in an order that didn't match how anyone would actually pick a pallet, and the loaders quietly ignored them.
CargoDuo prints out a pallet placement diagram per truck. It's the same paper format we've always used, just better arranged. The loading order respects how our forklifts actually move — the back-of-trailer pallets go first, the door pallets last, and there are no “now flip the entire load” moments. That sounds small. It is not small.
“The paper makes sense. That's what changed. I don't fight the plan anymore.”
Our day-shift forklift operator has been with us for nine years. When he says he doesn't fight the plan, that's the highest review you can get from this side of the business.
Things nobody warned us about
Nothing is free. A few things bit us:
- The first month was harder than the spreadsheet, not easier. Our planner had to learn the tool, the floor crew had to learn the new paperwork, and our drivers had to get used to a different loading sequence. Productivity dipped before it climbed.
- Bad master data became visible. Some of our SKU dimensions in the WMS were wrong. With the spreadsheet we never noticed; the planner just “knew”. CargoDuo doesn't know. We spent three days walking pallets with a tape measure.
- One customer didn't like change. Their receiving team had got used to a specific layout in the trailer. The new layout was better, but different. We sent them photos for two weeks until they stopped calling.
- The fifth truck had a job. When we dropped a daily run, our backup driver lost shifts. We had a frank conversation with him and moved him onto a different lane. Worth saying out loud, because nobody in the brochure mentions this.
Would we do it again
Yes. We're piloting CargoDuo on the Lyon lane next month and on the UK trailers in the autumn. I'd give two pieces of advice if you're considering this for your own lane.
First, pick one lane and run it in parallel with whatever you do today. Don't flip a whole DC at once. We learned more from one week of double-planning than from any demo.
Second, talk to your floor crew before you talk to the vendor. The plan is only as good as the people executing it. If your loaders don't buy in, the prettiest 3D diagram in the world won't save you. Ours bought in because the new paper made their day shorter, not longer.
I'm not the right person to tell you whether the algorithm inside CargoDuo is the best in the industry. I don't know and I don't care. What I can tell you is that for the first time since I've been running this dock, the planning software actually makes my work easier.