There are two different operations
A logistics company runs two very different workflows, and they need different software. The TMS vs work tracking question starts here, and skipping this distinction is the most common reason a software purchase goes to waste.
| Criterion | Shipment and fleet operations | Office and coordination work |
|---|---|---|
| Examples | Trip planning, vehicle assignment, routing, waybills, fleet tracking | Quote preparation, missing documents, customs correspondence, complaint files, tender prep |
| Whose work | Operations, traffic, fleet | Sales, customer service, finance, management |
| Unit of measure | Trip, vehicle, tonne, kilometre | Task, due date, owner |
| Right software | TMS, logistics ERP, fleet management | Work tracking software |
| What Slizer covers | Out of scope | This is where it works |
Why the logistics back office goes untracked
Investment in logistics rightly goes to operations: to vehicles, to the TMS, to fleet systems. The office side runs on "we will sort it out by phone". Yet a large share of lost customers and missed deadlines comes not from the shipment itself but from the coordination around it.
- A quote request stays in a salesperson’s phone and gets remembered two days later.
- It is unclear which side owes the missing customs document, so both wait for the other.
- A damage file is opened but nobody records who is chasing the insurer.
- A complaint is passed to operations verbally and whether it was answered is never logged.
- Documents for a new customer contract sit scattered across departments.
- A tender file gets assembled on the final day and one document turns out to be missing.
None of these are solved by a TMS, because none of them is a shipment. They are tasks: work with an owner, a due date and a status.
The three processes lost most often
Document tracking
Logistics document tracking is where the industry loses the most time. The paperwork for a single shipment arrives from different sources: the invoice from the customer, the declaration from customs, the CMR from the carrier. If it is not written down which document is missing and who owes it, the gap is discovered at the last possible moment.
The fix is not complicated: a checklist per shipment and an owner per document. When a document arrives it gets ticked; whatever has not arrived stays visible.
Complaints and damage claims
A complaint usually arrives by phone or email, gets passed to operations verbally, and disappears there. When the customer calls a second time the process restarts. Opened as a task instead, it records who is handling it, what stage it is at and when it closed.
There is a second benefit. At year end you can see how many complaints were opened per customer and how many days they took to close on average. That data is useful both in customer conversations and in fixing your own processes.
Quotes and tender preparation
Preparing a quote needs costing from operations, payment terms from finance and approval from management. If one link in that chain stalls the quote is late, and usually nobody knows where it stopped. Breaking the quote into subtasks makes the blocked step visible.
Related guideSee which metrics show where work is actually getting stuck.A structure that works for freight forwarding processes
The structure below fits the office side of most logistics companies. Simplify it to match how you actually work.
- A project per major customer: quotes, complaints and special requests all collect in one place.
- A document board: separate columns for awaited, received and completed paperwork.
- A complaints and claims board: open, under review, with insurer, closed.
- An internal projects board: one-off work such as a new warehouse opening, certification or a system migration.
- One owner and one due date on every task; without these, no board is worth setting up.
The fifth point matters most. However well the columns are designed, a task with no owner and no date does not get tracked. In team task tracking this single rule decides more than the board layout does.
Requests from the warehouse and the road
In logistics not everyone sits at a desk. A request coming from the warehouse, the port or the road has to be easy to get into the system, otherwise it stays on the phone and gets forgotten. Being able to create a task by sending a message on WhatsApp helps here, because the team is already using that app.
WhatsApp task managementSee how tasks can be created by sending a message.How it works alongside a TMS
The two are not competitors; they operate at different layers. A TMS manages the shipment itself. Work tracking software manages the human work around the shipment. Most logistics companies run both without any overlap, because they measure different things.
One question is enough when deciding: is the thing you want to track moving through a shipment, or through a person? Through a shipment means TMS. Through a person means work tracking.
In Slizer you can open a project per customer or per process and track tasks on Kanban boards. Every task takes an owner, a due date, a priority and labels, and multi-step work can be broken into subtasks. Documents attached to a task land automatically in the project’s file area, so the CMR, the invoice and the declaration stay together. Team chat and meeting management sit in the same workspace, so the conversation about a job does not end up somewhere separate from the job.
Work tracking softwareSee what Slizer covers in day-to-day work tracking.Related guideSee the criteria worth settling before you choose a tool.Related guideSee how work tracking software fits a team that already runs other systems.One Thing to Check This Week
This week, look at one list only: the customer complaints received in the past month. How many are recorded in writing, how many have a named owner, and how many are confirmed closed? Those three numbers are the fastest way to see the tracking gap in a logistics back office, and they usually come out worse than expected.