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Solution · ProcurementEvery subcontracted load goes to a carrier checked against registers, not its own PDFs
The carrier you booked is the carrier that shows up
Before a load is placed, robots verify the carrier's registration, authorisation, insurance and bank account against the sources that issue them; only the risky combinations stop for a person.
Executive summary
Your carrier file is built from documents the carrier chose to send you.
We build a verification gate in front of the booking, not a report about it afterwards.
Freight is placed with carriers whose identity, authorisation and cover were confirmed on the day of the load.
the TMS carrier master and booking gate; the SharePoint evidence library; Power BI
Business problem
Carrier vetting
A forwarder earns the difference between what the customer pays and what the subcontractor charges, so most of its freight moves on somebody else's trucks. Contracted lanes draw on a core of regular carriers; a spot load draws on whatever is available that afternoon, from a load board such as Trans.eu or TIMOCOM to a name a colleague used last month. The commercial decision takes minutes; the verification behind it takes longer, and it gives way.
What gets verified, when anyone verifies at all, is a set of documents the carrier itself supplied, and each can be genuine and still tell you nothing. A real haulier's papers circulate. Cover lapses between the date on a certificate and the day of the loading. A domain one character from the registered one reads as ordinary in a busy inbox.
The people who feel this never created the exposure. The dispatcher is already working on tomorrow; finance only notices an account that changed twice in a quarter. When a load fails to arrive, the claim reaches the desk that placed the order with a request for the file: who was booked, what was checked, on which date, against which source. In most forwarding offices that file is assembled afterwards, out of a mailbox and a spreadsheet.
How it works today
This is the route a booking takes when capacity must be covered before morning.
- PersonA dispatcher finds a truck on a load board or through a broker, agrees a rate by telephone, and receives a licence scan, a certificate of cover and a signed confirmation
- WaitingThe verification the procedure asks for waits for a quiet moment that a same-day load never provides
- SystemThe carrier is created in the TMS from that message, bank account included, and the order goes out
- Risk of errorNobody compares the plates on the order with the plates that arrive at the loading place
- Risk of errorA later message changes the bank account for this invoice only, and whoever opens it applies it
- PersonRenewal dates sit in a spreadsheet nobody owns, so a policy that expired in June is still on file
Why the current process costs more than it appears
The cost grows where nobody is looking.
- Speed is why the check gets skipped: capacity for a same-day load is agreed in minutes, and a quarter of an hour loses that argument every time.
- Certificates prove a document exists, not that it is current, that the premium was paid, that cover reaches the country this load crosses, or that the sender is named on it.
- Every dispatcher keeps a private list of carriers they trust that the company cannot see. When that person leaves, the list goes with them.
- Account changes arrive as ordinary messages on a busy day, and the person applying one is rarely the person who onboarded the carrier.
Cost of inaction
Freight that disappears is absent from every row above, and absent honestly: load values vary enormously, no institutional source prices how often it happens, and a number invented for a slide would be worth less than the blank. What the rows price is the salaried work of a control performed on the bookings that had time for it.
The exposure that grows is documentary. A forwarder that cannot show, load by load, which carrier was verified and against which source argues from memory: with a customer after an incident, and internally at the next renewal of its own cover, where the manual meets the practice.
A plausible organisation with realistic proportions. The figures are there to be recalculated on your data; they are not a client result.
A Polish freight forwarder, 140 staff across three branches, moving international and domestic road freight. A TMS holds orders, carriers and settlement, the office runs on Microsoft 365 E3, and there is no development team.
1,300 subcontracted loads a month placed with about 340 carriers. Roughly 90 are contracted and used weekly, the rest is spot capacity, and about 60 are new each quarter.
Documents are requested at first use and filed per carrier. A spreadsheet lists carrier, licence number, insurer, expiry date and who checked it. Under pressure the checking column is filled in later, or never.
About fourteen minutes per booking when the check is genuinely performed, across four sources and a note. Affordable a week ahead, impossible within the hour, which is where the risk concentrates.
Robots verify the carrier against the sources that issue the facts rather than the documents the carrier sent, before the order can leave the TMS, and re-open the check whenever an account or a contact channel moves.
In the modelled case every booking carries a verification that ran before the order was issued, the desk works from a few holds a day, and a changed account never reaches a payment run unchecked. These figures are a model, not a client measurement.
Proposed solution
We build a verification gate in front of the booking, not a report about it afterwards. When a dispatcher drafts an order for a subcontractor, deterministic checks run before it can be issued, reading sources rather than attachments: the commercial register for legal identity; the public part of the national electronic register of road transport undertakings for the authorisation and the vehicles it covers; the tax administration's sources for VAT status and the account you are about to pay; and your insurer's route for cover on the day of the loading.
The second half of the design is drift. A carrier correct in March is not correct in September by default, and the changes that matter arrive as ordinary messages: a new bank account for this invoice only, a new contact on a new domain, a new address. Each one re-opens the check and holds the next booking or the payment until it clears.
None of this uses a language model, which is deliberate: a rule that stops a booking must be explainable to the dispatcher whose truck is waiting and reproducible in front of a customer eighteen months later. Scoring bands do the rest. A first load, a high declared value, an account changed inside thirty days, or an authorisation covering three vehicles behind a carrier offering forty loads a month becomes a task in Microsoft Teams. Everything else clears itself, so the list stays short.
UiPath Orchestrator queues, triggers, credential stores and audit; UiPath Robots; UiPath Integration Service connectors for Microsoft Teams and Microsoft OneDrive & SharePoint, plus Connector Builder; UiPath Action Center in Microsoft Teams; Microsoft Purview retention labels; Power BI
The rule set and its scoring bands, the register, tax and insurance read routines, the identity checks on domains, numbers and accounts, the booking gate and write-back to the TMS, and the evidence pack
Your TMS, through whichever interface that product exposes; public registers and the insurer route, wrapped as managed connections through UiPath Integration Service Connector Builder; screen-only sources read by a robot
How the automated process works
- AutomationA draft booking queues the carrier's tax identifier, and the order cannot be issued until the checks have run
- SystemRobots read the commercial register, the operator register, the tax and account sources, and the confirmation of cover
- AutomationRegistered name, legal form, address, authorisation and vehicle count are compared with what the carrier supplied, each difference recorded with its source
- AutomationContact channels are compared with the registered ones: domain, its age, and whether the number appears against a different tax identifier
- SystemA clear result writes the verified record to the TMS, releases the order and files the evidence pack
- PersonScored holds arrive as a UiPath Action Center task in Microsoft Teams; the duty forwarder releases, asks for a document or refuses
- AutomationAny later change to an account, an address or a contact channel re-opens the check and holds payment until it clears
- AutomationPower BI shows verified share, holds by reason, time to release, overrides and cover expiring inside thirty days
Human-in-the-loop model
Automation handles
- Reading the registers, the tax sources and the confirmation of cover on every booking, not only at first use
- Comparing what the sources say with what the carrier supplied, and scoring the result
- Releasing clear bookings, writing the verified record to the TMS and filing the dated evidence pack
- Watching accounts, addresses and contact channels, and re-opening the check when one moves
People decide
- Whether a held booking goes ahead, on what evidence, and what is asked of the carrier first
- Whether a changed bank account is genuine, before any payment is released against it
- Whether an urgent load justifies an override, recorded with a name and a reason
- The rules themselves: value thresholds, the first-load rule, the change rules and the sources
Before and after
Systems and integrations
We do not add technology to make an architecture look serious. Every element below has a specific job in this process.
Inputs
- the draft booking in your TMS
- the commercial register
- the public part of the national road transport operator register
- the tax administration's taxpayer and account sources
- the insurer route
- your own carrier and claims history
Automation layer
- UiPath Orchestrator
- UiPath Robots
- UiPath Integration Service
- UiPath Action Center
Target systems
- the TMS carrier master and booking gate
- the SharePoint evidence library
- Power BI
Human touchpoints: Action Center holds in Microsoft Teams; bank-account change approval; the daily summary in the forwarding channel
Technologies used
run the checks per booking; queue, schedule, retries, credentials and audit trail
Areads register, tax and insurer endpoints as managed connections; posts the queue and files evidence
Aheld bookings and change re-checks decided where the forwarding desk already works
Aa dated evidence pack per carrier and per load, kept with the order file
Averified share, holds by reason, time to release, overrides and expiring cover
Apublic source for the authorisation, the establishment and the vehicles covered
Breceives the verified record and the release, or holds the order
CIllustrative economic model
What it is worth, with the arithmetic shown.
A forwarder that verified every carrier properly would spend the hours below; most spend a fraction and carry the difference as exposure. The model prices the full check at fourteen minutes per booking, covering the register lookups, the account check, the confirmation of cover and the note that records it, at €24 an hour, a fully loaded forwarding-office rate in Central Europe. Both figures are ours, not a client's.
Run the numbers on your data
An illustrative estimate from your own inputs. It models released capacity; it is not a promise of savings.
Business benefits
- Freight is placed with carriers whose identity, authorisation and cover were confirmed on the day of the load
- The check stops depending on how busy the desk is, so an evening booking is treated like a lane contracted a week ahead
- A changed bank account or a new contact domain re-opens the file automatically instead of being accepted in the thread it arrived in
- The forwarding desk works from a short hold list with reasons attached, not from a procedure it must remember
- Every load carries an evidence pack that answers a customer's questions after an incident without anyone rebuilding it
The management view
- The share of loads placed with a verified carrier becomes a figure on a report, not an assumption inside a policy
- Risk appetite becomes explicit: value thresholds, the first-load rule and the account-change rule are written once and applied every time
- Holds are visible with their reasons and their age, so whether control slows the business is settled with numbers
- The control survives holidays, a chaotic Friday and the departure of the dispatcher who knew everybody
Board-level KPIs
Security and governance
Security is designed with the process, not after it.
- Robots sign in to the TMS and to every source with their own accounts, scoped to read what the rules need and write only the verification result
- Secrets stay in the Orchestrator credential store, or in Azure Key Vault if your security team prefers, and a workflow receives a reference, not a password
- Each check records what was asked, of which source, at what time and what came back, so today's verification is reproducible two years from now
- Personal data stays limited to what the check needs, chiefly names the registers publish, retained under a Microsoft Purview retention label with the order file
- Robots run in the EU region of UiPath Automation Cloud and write into your own Microsoft 365 tenant; whoever releases a hold never created the booking
Why now
Subcontracting is where this sector's volume sits, and Poland carries more of it than anyone: Eurostat, published 31 July 2026, puts Polish road freight at 381.0 billion tonne-kilometres in 2025, 20.2% of the EU total, and attributes 43.7% of EU cabotage to Polish hauliers. More cross-border work means more counterparties nobody has met.
Authorisation data is public by law. Regulation (EC) No 1071/2009 obliges every Member State to keep a national electronic register of authorised road transport operators, and makes the name, legal form, establishment address, transport manager and type of authorisation publicly accessible.
The modelled €7,280 a month of verification work is the visible half. The invisible half is that the check is skipped precisely on the urgent bookings, which are the ones a fraudulent carrier chooses.
Relevant executive roles
One incident with an unverified subcontractor costs months of management attention and a customer relationship; this decides whether the company can show what it knew before the load moved.
Capacity gets placed faster, because a verified carrier releases itself and only the genuinely odd combinations stop the desk for a decision.
Payments go to accounts recorded for that taxpayer, and a changed account never reaches a payment run without a second pair of eyes.
Common questions and objections
They must be able to, so the override is designed in: it needs a named person and a reason, and it appears in the report. A control nobody can bypass gets bypassed outside the system.
Correct, and the design says so. Serious-infringement data in the operator register is available to competent authorities, not to us, and no public source confirms that a premium was paid. The checks compare what is published with what the carrier supplied, and send the difference to a person.
That is where the checks are cheapest. A stranger is caught by the first-load rule; a long-standing carrier whose account, domain or address moves is caught by the change trigger, and that is the case that costs real money.
When this is not the right solution
- A carrier base of a few dozen, all contracted, all paid to the same accounts for years, where a quarterly re-check by one person is cheaper
- An operator running only its own fleet and never subcontracting; that compliance work is about vehicles and drivers, and it is a different case
- A TMS with no carrier master worth the name, where bookings live in a mailbox and a spreadsheet; the record has to exist before anything can gate it
A question for the next management meeting
Before a load leaves with a subcontractor tomorrow, what does this company actually know about that carrier that did not come from the carrier itself?
Implementation approach
What we deliver, and what we need from you to start.
We deliver
- A review of one month of your bookings: carriers used, which were new, and what was actually checked
- The verification rule set: sources read, what counts as a match, which combinations stop a booking
- The read routines, as managed connections where an interface is published and as robot reads where only a screen exists
- The booking gate and write-back into your TMS with its override path, the change triggers on accounts and contact channels, and the evidence pack
- A pilot on one branch, then rollout with hypercare, the Teams hold queue, the Power BI report and a runbook
We need from you
- Three months of booking history with the carriers used and the incidents behind your current rules
- The carrier master export from the TMS, with bank details, contact channels and expiry dates
- A named owner in forwarding, someone from finance for the payment side, and technical accounts
Stages
Discovery
One month of bookings, the carrier master and the incidents behind today's rules
Design
Sources, rule set, scoring bands, the override path and the security model
Build
Robots, connections, the booking gate, the Teams queue and the evidence pack
Validation
Rules replayed against historical bookings, including the ones that went wrong
Go-live
One branch under supervision, then the rest with hypercare and tuning
Departmental. Effort follows the number of sources in scope, whether your TMS offers an interface or only a screen, and the state of the carrier master.
If tomorrow's load goes to a carrier nobody checked, the file will still look complete.
Send us the tax identifiers of ten carriers you booked last month with whatever you hold on file. We come back with what the public sources say and where your file disagrees.
Run the checks on ten of your carriersThe neighbouring process usually has the same problem
Stop losing three weeks and the compliance evidence every time a plant needs a new supplier.
View solution Finance & accountingVendor master changes with bank-account fraud controlOne convincing email is all it takes to send a six-figure payment to a fraudster's account.
View solution Legal & complianceCounterparty screening: sanctions, VAT status, registersYour counterparty file was true on the day you checked it. Sanctions and VAT status moved after that.
View solutionIndustries we deliver this in most oftenTransport & logistics