Evaluation of Business Processes in Goods Delivery at a Digital Freight Forwarding Logistics Company

Abstract

In a digital freight forwarding company, the entire business process, from RFQ offers to shipment delivery, is recorded in the ELI Trade application. The RFQ offer process plays a crucial role in the execution of the business process. The key factors for the success of the RFQ offer process in a logistics service company are timeliness and pricing. According to company data from 2023, the Key Performance Indicator (KPI) shows that the speed of the RFQ pricing process, from Create RFQ to Approve Bid, is still recorded at 92.1% of the 95% achievement target. This indicates a gap between the target and achievement of 2.9%. There is still room for improvement to evaluate the operational processes occurring in the system, given that the RFQ offer process is a crucial part of the business process, determining whether the shipment will proceed or be canceled. The research approach uses Process Mining (PM) with event log data from the end-to-end shipping service process recorded in the system. The event log data captures information from each shipment case, the activities performed, and the timestamps of each activity. This data is extracted from the ELI Trade platform and processed to discover the actual process model of the shipping service. This process model can be further analyzed to find the duration of each process, identify variations in the process, and detect deviations from the expected process as per the Standard Operating Procedure (SOP). The findings from this identification process are used as a basis for improvements in the process analysis stage. The process analysis stage is conducted using a cause/effect analysis method to find the root cause of issues in the related processes. The final stage of this research is proposing process improvements that impact the effectiveness and efficiency of the shipping service process. For the company, this research provides an overview of end-to-end operational process activities recorded in the system, allowing for the identification of the sequence of each shipping service process against the existing company SOP. From the visualization of this process sequence, the company can also identify which processes are ineffective and inefficient in specific areas, thus requiring improvements to enhance business processes that impact operational effectiveness and efficiency.