At a glance
At a global agriculture business with more than 80,000 employees, the logistics team maintained rail shipment forecasts in two Excel workbooks. Planners combined daily load orders with operational updates from their colleagues.
Before WIQ
- Load orders were in Power BI, operational updates were in Teams, and forecasts lived in two Excel workbooks.
- Planners had to reconcile order and rail-car updates before applying each site’s shipment-count rules.
- Each forecast required updates to two workbooks, including creating a row for the current date when one was missing.
The wider logistics program deployed 36 agents, cut shipment exception-handling time by 60%, and reduced demurrage and detention costs by $720,000 a year. Rail forecasting was one workflow within that program, part of the same agribusiness engagement described in our contract-to-cash story.
Read the orders and the operational updates
- input sources
- 2
- applications in the workflow
- 3
Load orders and operational updates
Power BI, Teams, and Excel
The integration spans three applications: load orders in Power BI, operational messages in Teams, and forecast records in Excel. WIQ configured the connectors in the customer’s Copilot Studio environment. The agent queries the day’s load orders for the relevant origin stations, then reads the team’s order IDs and rail-car notifications.
The tested workflow also applies a site-specific adjustment: for one origin, it subtracts cars flagged as “Bad Order” in Teams from the shipping total. Reading the load orders alone would miss that adjustment. The agent has to combine the reporting data with the operational messages before writing the forecast.
Update the two forecast workbooks
The agent writes carrier codes and actual car counts into the first Excel workbook, creating a row if the current date is missing.
It then updates actuals in the second workbook, subtracting the flagged cars where required. Planners continue working in the same two spreadsheets.
Return inconsistent inputs to the coordinator
If the reporting data or team updates are missing or inconsistent, the agent notifies the logistics coordinator through Teams. The coordinator checks the data or documents the error.
Results across the logistics program
- less shipment exception-handling time
- 60%
- annual reduction in demurrage and detention costs
- $720K
- agents deployed across logistics
- 36
These results cover the logistics program as a whole. The rail forecasting workflow described here is one example of how its agents bring reporting data and operational updates into the team’s planning tools.
Beyond rail forecasting
Rail forecasting sits within the same contract-to-cash program as settlement processing and contract cleanup. The wider program’s expansion roadmap includes SAP transportation, procurement, and sales workflows, alongside a rollout across additional regions.
For each region, the proposed sequence is discovery, workflow selection, a pilot, and ongoing operation.
