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AGMM / Industries / Logistics

AI for logistics and distribution: where does the day actually go?

Into the phone. Job intake, re-planning around an exception, chasing a proof of delivery and reconciling what a subcontractor says they did. A spreadsheet cannot hold that layer and an enterprise platform will not price it. AGMM is an AI consultancy that builds for the operator in between.

By Sam Wall and Adam Gillett · Checked on

Greater Manchester / UK and international delivery

Two papers from the work. Demonstration with sample documents. In the Audit we draw your real lines.

What we can prove, and what it proves

What can you check, and what does it not prove?

The nearest thing you can inspect today is how we run our own business. One of our knowledge bases holds the whole business written down, and every system in it is drawn on Inside AGMM, department by department.

It is here because a haulier needs the same discipline: one record for every job, an owner for every exception, and a receipt for every run, from the booking to the invoice. The paper beside this text is the kind of record that discipline produces.

It proves the standard we build to, and nothing about vehicles, drivers or depots. We will not stretch it that far. What we have not done in logistics has its own heading below.

Demonstration. A sample proof of delivery, not a client document.

Process level, not hype

What does AI change in a logistics operation?

Three things worth paying for, and they are less exciting than the brochures. It reads what arrives in a hundred layouts: a booking email, a delivery note photographed in a cab, a subcontractor invoice, a customs document. It answers questions across records never designed to be queried together, so which jobs are waiting on a proof of delivery is a screen rather than an afternoon. And it drafts the rate, the reconciliation or the customer update as a first version a person corrects.

What it does not do is plan your day better than your planner. Route optimisation is mature and useful, but it is a solved problem sold as a new one, and it produces confident nonsense when the job data going into it is inconsistent. If your intake is three people typing the same booking three ways, optimisation is not your next purchase. Consistent intake is.

The processes, in order

Where does the margin leak between the booking and the invoice?

These six carry the time and the cash in nearly every haulier and 3PL we look at.

  1. 01

    Job intake and the phone call it replaces

    A customer rings or emails with a collection, a postcode, a weight and a date. Somebody writes it on a sheet, in a system and sometimes both, and the job is re-described three times before a vehicle is assigned.

  2. 02

    Dispatch and driver allocation

    The plan lives with one planner. It works, until they are on holiday. Nobody else can see why that load went on that vehicle, so nobody else can defend or repeat the decision.

  3. 03

    Exceptions and re-planning

    A vehicle breaks down, a delivery is refused, a customer moves a window at nine. The re-plan happens in a head and travels by phone, and what changed is recorded only in the invoice argument six weeks later.

  4. 04

    Proof of delivery and the chase

    The load is delivered and the invoice waits on a document. Paper in a cab, a photograph in a messaging app, a signature asked for twice. Cash sits in that gap, and the gap is weeks.

  5. 05

    Subcontractor rates and self-billing

    Work put out to other operators at rates agreed by conversation. Reconciling what was agreed, done and invoiced is a month-end job, and the invisible margin is usually here.

  6. 06

    Where is my delivery?

    A customer rings to ask where a load is. Somebody checks the planner, rings the driver and rings back. The same question, answered by hand, many times a day, and none of it is on the job.

Now picture yours

The same work, three ways.

Proof of delivery, job intake, exceptions and subcontractor reconciliation, in four departments, drawn the way most operators run them, then organised, then agentified. Step through the real papers.

Customer service From the cab to the invoice

  1. The load is delivered.

  2. Signature and photograph, captured once.

  3. A missing signature goes back before the invoice waits on it.

  4. The invoice goes the same day.

  5. Cash stops sitting in the gap.

  1. As it runs now

    A job re-described three times before a vehicle is assigned, a plan that lives with one planner, proof of delivery as paper in a cab while the invoice waits, and subcontractor invoices checked at month end.

  2. Organised

    Every job described once, every change recorded against it, and proof of delivery attached to the job on the day it happens.

  3. Agentified

    Intake captured from the call or the email, re-plans drafted as options for the planner to choose, and the invoice ready the moment the proof arrives.

A person decidesRuns on its ownBack with notesDemonstration. Sample documents, no client data. Timings compressed.

Sequencing

What should you automate first?

Not the plan. The cash. In most operations the order comes out as: proof of delivery, then intake, then subcontractor reconciliation.

  1. FirstProof of delivery, captured and matched to the job
  2. SecondJob intake, described once
  3. ThirdSubcontractor reconciliation, once the first two work

Proof of delivery first because it is the shortest route to money you have already earned, measurable in days of sales outstanding within a month, and the one change drivers accept because it is faster than the paper. Intake second, because every downstream system inherits the inconsistency created in the first ninety seconds of a job. Subcontractor reconciliation third, because it needs the first two working before the comparison means anything.

Dispatch, driver allocation and planning sit on scheduling and booking software. The document chasing around proof of delivery, self-billing and compliance records is business process automation. Rating ad-hoc loads from written-down rules is quoting and estimating software. Which of those is true for your operation is what the fourteen-day constraint audit establishes, from your figures rather than a sector benchmark.

Integration

Will it work with the TMS you already run?

That is the intended design, and it is usually the cheaper answer. Your transport system holds the jobs, the vehicles and the financial record. Replacing it is a year of disruption with the payback at the far end, and the problem that sent you looking for help is rarely inside it anyway.

The pattern that works is narrow: leave the system of record alone, build the missing step next to it, read what it needs, write back what it produces, and document the join. The same holds for telematics, a warehouse system and the accounts package. Where a system has no interface and the supplier will not provide one, the audit puts a number on that rather than promising it away.

Records you already keep

Which records are you already required to keep?

There is no AI regulator for road transport and we are not going to invent one. What exists is the ordinary compliance surface you already live with, and the software point is narrow: a business that assembles these records when somebody asks does expensive work twice, and one that captures them as the job happens already holds them. All read on 21 September 2026, and none of this is compliance advice.

  • Operator licensing

    Sits with the Traffic Commissioners. Licence conditions are published in GOV.UK’s goods vehicle operator licensing guide.

    Traffic Commissioners and the licensing guide · read on 21 September 2026

  • Drivers’ hours

    The rules, and the records that evidence them, are in GOV.UK’s drivers’ hours guidance.

    Drivers’ hours guidance · read on 21 September 2026

  • Customs declarations

    Made through the Customs Declaration Service, usually via an agent.

    Customs Declaration Service · read on 21 September 2026

  • FORS

    A voluntary accreditation scheme many customers ask for in tenders.

    FORS · read on 21 September 2026

AGMM holds no operator licence, no FORS accreditation and no customs intermediary status, and nothing we build makes you compliant with any of the above. Those duties stay with your transport manager, your compliance adviser and your agent. What a system can do is stop a maintenance record, a licence expiry or a signed document being something one person remembers.

The commercial terms

What does it cost? The audit is £2,000, then a scoped build.

One published price and one invoice: £2,000 for a fourteen-day constraint audit, built around three sixty-minute sessions with the founders who would scope any build. You keep four documents whatever you decide: a constraint map, an AI opportunity map, an economic case per option, and a ranked order for spending.

A build is proposed afterwards in its own document, priced to the work. We publish no band for logistics, because the number is set by how many rules the system must hold and the state of your job data. The audit fee is not credited against the build, and sometimes the recommendation is to buy a transport product and spend nothing with us.

The full ladder is on what it costs. What other UK firms publish, sourced and dated, is on the AI consultancy cost comparison.

Boundaries

What this does not include

  • Telematics hardware, tachograph units, handheld devices and subscriptions. Those stay in your name and AGMM takes no margin on them.
  • Replacing your transport management system. If that is the answer it is a TMS project with a TMS budget, and we will say so rather than sell around it.
  • A guarantee of empty running reduced, fuel saved or on-time delivery improved. AGMM cannot evidence one, so it does not sell one.
  • Any compliance or regulated opinion. Operator licensing, drivers’ hours, maintenance regimes and customs declarations stay with your transport manager and your agent.
  • Accreditation of any kind. We hold none, and we will not imply that a system we build makes you compliant with a scheme.
  • The build itself. The £2,000 buys the diagnostic, and the fee is not deducted from a build.

Fit, stated plainly

Who this is not for

  • An operator turning over under roughly £1m. A handful of vehicles is better served by an off-the-shelf transport package, and the audit would cost more than the problem.
  • Anyone who wants a tool installed. There are good transport systems on the market and the audit may conclude that buying one is your answer.
  • A business whose planning rules live in one planner’s head and who does not want that to change. Software can apply a rule, not extract a judgement nobody will describe.
  • Anyone expecting route optimisation to be the answer on its own. If the job data going in is inconsistent, optimisation produces confident nonsense.
  • Anyone who needs work started next week or wants a free strategy document. The audit runs fourteen days by design and the diagnostic is paid, deliberately.

If that is you, the straight answer is an off-the-shelf transport package or a cheaper tool, and the fit call will say so in thirty minutes rather than after an invoice.

The limits of our evidence

What we cannot show you yet

AGMM has no published logistics case study. No named operator, no anonymised one, no fleet size, no days of sales outstanding recovered and no on-time figure. There is nothing in this sector we can link and let you check, and until there is we are not going to write one.

This is deliberately the last of the sector pages, because it is where our evidence is thinnest. Scheduling and dispatch is one of the five things we build and the processes above are ones we have worked on elsewhere, but that is capability rather than a logistics result. What exists is Inside AGMM, which proves we can build systems that keep an auditable record of every run. AGMM was incorporated in April 2025 and most of what it builds sits inside client systems we cannot publish. The day we have a logistics artefact you can open, it goes at the top of this page.

Across the business

Which departments does this touch?

Dispatch and driver allocation sit in Operations and delivery. Proof of delivery and subcontractor reconciliation carry the cash, so they sit in Finance. Exceptions are Customer service, and the subcontractors are Suppliers and procurement. The audit looks across all of them.

Questions before a call

Frequently asked questions

Is this only for large logistics enterprises?
No, and the gap is why this page exists. The published material goes from trade-press generalities straight to enterprise platforms priced in six and seven figures. An operator with twelve to eighty vehicles is served by almost nobody, and the processes costing them money are ordinary software problems.
Will it integrate with our existing TMS?
That is the intended shape of the work. Leave the transport system where it is and build the missing step beside it. Most of what hurts in a mid-sized operation is not inside the TMS at all. It is the proof of delivery chase, the subcontractor reconciliation and the exceptions handled on the phone.
How long does implementation take?
The audit is fourteen days, fixed. A first build is scoped in weeks rather than months, because a transport operation changes what it needs the moment something runs in it. Anything scoped past a quarter before you have shipped once is needless risk.
What return should we expect?
We do not know, and we will not publish a percentage we cannot evidence. Where the money usually sits: days of sales outstanding lost to proof of delivery, subcontractor invoices that do not match what was agreed, and re-keying the same job three times. The audit measures those three and puts a number on each.
How do we get drivers and planners to use it?
By taking work away rather than adding it. A proof of delivery capture faster than the paper it replaces gets used. Another thing to do at the end of a fourteen-hour day does not. The test for any driver-facing screen is whether it can be completed in thirty seconds with gloves on.
What about customs and HMRC data?
Customs declarations are made through the Customs Declaration Service, and for most operators an agent handles them. We build systems that hold the commercial data those declarations are built from, so commodity codes, values and consignment details are recorded once. We do not make declarations and we are not a customs intermediary.

Start with the constraint

Find what is worth changing before you fund a build.

Thirty minutes, free, nothing bought on the call. Bring a month of proof of delivery chasing or a subcontractor reconciliation you could not make balance, and we will say whether the problem is the intake, the document or the plan. The audit is £2,000 if it fits, and we will tell you if it does not.

Book the free fit callCall 0161 543 7189
  1. MessyHand-offs lost in inboxes
  2. OrganisedEach job has a clear owner and step
  3. RunningRoutine hand-offs run; exceptions reach a person
Lit: Operations and delivery, where the call starts. The audit then looks across all twelve departments for constraints, weak points and money to save or earn.