Ghanem Forwarding LLC Case Study

Automating Freight Forwarding with Power Apps

About Ghanem Forwarding LLC

Ghanem Forwarding, a Federal Maritime Commission (FMC) licensed NVOCC and Freight Forwarder, provides vehicle export logistics services from the USA to West Africa & the Middle East. Operating as agents between shippers, ocean carriers, and inland transporters, they have been delivering cars, vans, trucks, equipment, & containers.

Challenges of Manual Maintenance of Data for Ghanem Forwarding

When Ghanem Forwarding started, they manually maintained all the vendor details, shipment details, pricing, and other related information in Excel sheets and forwarded them over email. Invoice processing and payment summaries were maintained manually, which was hectic, time-consuming, and left room for mistakes. Reports were a challenging task too.

Leveraging SQL Servers and Power Apps as Solutions

Our team leveraged a SQL server as their database and developed a fully automated application using Power Apps. The app would track vessel status, related documentation, expenses, bank transactions, and reporting. It also has an in-built invoice processing feature using OneDrive and HTML codes with multiple payment options and the bonus functionality of live exchange rates from XE.com.

Outcome of employing Power Apps and SQL Servers for Ghanem Forwarding

With an automated application in place, Ghanem Forwarding, LLC has these advantages:

1. They can now maintain all the information in one place.
2. This automation brought down their hours to minutes with zero chances of error and doubled their overall efficiency.
3. Integration with XE.com made the invoice more up-to-date and informative, as it gave a clear view of the exchange rate without leaving the application.
4. Maintaining the invoices was now more manageable than before.

How Payment Options Were Managed Better with Automations

It gave four different payment options –

• Zero down payment,
• Bulk payment,
• Single payment or
• Partial payment

These added more flexibility to the deal. Sharing invoices was made convenient by allowing the user to select between email invoices or printed PDF invoices.

The application provided the functionality to filter reports as per the requirement. They can generate reports for shipment status and payment status and export the information to an Excel sheet.

Key Performance Metrics Improvement

25%

Faster Payment Processing

65%

Less Errors

44%

Quicker Reporting