Sivitrans reduced CMR creation time 9× with Planlogi
Sivitrans
Company profile
Sivitrans is a family business founded in 1997, focused on transporting cars and vans across Europe.
The team is small but built for high-volume, time-critical work: four people in the office, supported by 13 professional drivers.
They move roughly 350 vehicles a week between dealerships, storage compounds and markets.
At the core of Sivitrans' customer base are car dealerships, sellers and importers in the Baltics and across Europe.
For these customers, three key things matter:
vehicles arrive in the right place at the right time
the paperwork describes the load exactly as reality requires
the carrier sticks to the agreed volumes, schedule and special requests
That is why Sivitrans built its way of working on keeping promises, accuracy and flexibility: deadlines hold, agreements are honoured, and special requests are accommodated wherever possible.
Sivitrans is a niche specialist that handles car and van transport every single day and knows the quirks of the work down to the detail, from ferry schedules and ports to VINs, dealers and the fine points of each destination. That is the backdrop Planlogi was rolled out onto: a small, tight-knit, deeply committed team for whom every error on a CMR means real wasted hours, frustration and money.
Company size
4 office staff, 13 drivers
Areas served
Estonia ↔ Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Germany, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, Czechia
Transport volume
350 orders per week
Customers
Leading Baltic and European automotive companies, dealers, dealerships and sellers (including Toyota Baltic, Suzuki, BMW, Hyundai, Lexus and Audi)
Services
International car and van transport; reefer transport from Spain to Northern Europe (food, fruit) and backhauls (metal, paper)
Before Planlogi: 9 minutes per CMR, and the whole day disappearing into Excel
Before Planlogi, Sivitrans' day-to-day logistics ran on the planner's own logic and one enormous Excel sheet.
Everything started and ended in the same file: load planning, splitting by dealer, VINs, CMRs. Flexible, yes, but at the same time horribly fragile.
A typical day looked like this:
an order came in from Finland with 120 cars
the cars had to be split in Excel between dealers in Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia
each load held an average of 8 cars
every dealer needed a separate CMR
Each CMR was effectively a hand-built project, copy-pasting between Excel tables wired together with complex formulas.
Producing a single consignment note took 9 minutes, and on a busy day there were up to 15 CMRs to make.
From a management point of view, that meant:
2+ hours of the planner's day went purely on creating CMRs
planning inevitably slipped to the end of the day, once all the volumes were finally clear
the most time-critical work got done when the working day should already have been over
"The whole operation used to be one big maze of Excel and copy-paste, where mistakes were a daily event and paper flew out of the printer by the thousand."
The riskiest mistakes: wrong VINs, wrong destinations, duplicate loads
A system running on Excel and copy-paste isn't just slow, it's risky.
One bad copy was all it took for:
the wrong dealer to end up on a CMR
the Riga paperwork to arrive in Kaunas, or vice versa
two drivers to reach the port for the same load, but carrying documents with different destinations
A situation like that isn't a small slip. It means:
extra trips and hours that generate no revenue
phone calls, explanations, stress for the driver and the planner
reputational damage with a customer who receives a load with the wrong paperwork
Sivitrans understood the problem perfectly well, but the right solution wasn't there. They reviewed transport management systems and logistics tools repeatedly, and they were either wildly expensive or built around parcel/general-freight logic rather than vehicle transport.
The turning point came when the company had grown into a phase where Excel and manual CMRs were holding back growth and increasing operational risk. Sivitrans realised that the next step up needed a solution like Planlogi, not at some point in the future, but as soon as possible.
"Since we rolled out Planlogi, we have not had a single error on our CMRs. Everything is exactly as it should be."
Why did Sivitrans choose Planlogi?
For Sivitrans, the critical thing was to find a solution that wouldn't break what already worked, but would remove the most painful manual work and the risk that came with it.
The new system had to help them:
cut the time spent creating CMRs
eliminate errors in the paperwork (wrong dealers, wrong VINs, wrong destinations)
keep their planning flexibility
bring the critical information into one system that is easy for the whole team to use and understand
During the demo call with Planlogi, Sivitrans quickly realised that Planlogi wasn't trying to force them into someone else's box and wasn't just another "generic TMS". It was a solution that could genuinely be shaped around a car carrier's workflows. Sivitrans was also impressed by Planlogi's pace of product development and the steady stream of new features.
Beyond the technical wins, Sivitrans was very clear about the role of Planlogi's customer support. They weren't left to wrestle with a new system on their own and got a support team that responded quickly, dealt with issues, and carried promised changes through to the end, whether those were small tweaks to a workflow or larger pieces of development.
The onboarding team explained step by step how to move the daily work into Planlogi, kept the pilot actively running, and helped prioritise what had to be done immediately versus what could wait. Even though almost all of it happened remotely, the impression was of "our own people", an extension to our team you can always turn to.
"If you're not even considering a Planlogi-type solution today, then honestly, you've got no business being in this sector."
How does Sivitrans manage transport with Planlogi now?
Today Sivitrans has moved its most time-consuming and highest-risk processes into Planlogi, and as a result the same team can handle significantly more volume.
"Before Planlogi, making one CMR took me 9 minutes. Now I do the same thing in 45 seconds."
With Planlogi, the Sivitrans workflow looks like this:
Loads are roughed out in Excel first.
Everything that touches orders and CMRs then moves into Planlogi. Once the loads are clear in Excel, the data is brought into Planlogi via bulk upload, where orders are created, tied to trips, and CMRs are generated with a single click.
Planning happens in the Planlogi view, not just off a spreadsheet. Unplanned orders, trips and addresses are visible as a list and on a map. That makes it easier to split loads by vehicle/date/country, plan terminal loads (collection and distribution legs) between ports, and search quickly when you need a specific vehicle's or customer's details.
CMRs and information are always current. When something in an order changes (address, date, quantity), the change is made in Planlogi and a new consignment note is produced automatically.
The archive and search are one click away. When a customer calls and asks "Who delivered this load?" or "What VINs were on it?", it no longer means digging through folders. In Planlogi you search by VIN, customer, address or date, and the information is right there.
9× faster CMRs and 500 hours a year freed up
With Planlogi, Sivitrans has brought mission-critical information into a single system. Every order, load and CMR sits in the backlog, searchable by VIN, customer, address or date, and every move is captured in the log. The whole team works in real time from one system, off correct information.
A CMR in 45 seconds instead of 9 minutes
The biggest win, in Sivitrans' own assessment, has been CMR automation. Where a single CMR used to take 9 minutes in Excel, today the same CMR is ready in Planlogi in about 45 seconds. At up to 15 CMRs a day, that's 2 hours saved per day (roughly 500 hours a year per planner).
"If Planlogi's planning and consignment-note functionality disappeared tomorrow, I'd probably disappear from the company along with it."
Paperwork errors driven practically to zero
On top of that, Planlogi has let Sivitrans eliminate error-prone manual work. Wrong VINs and wrong destinations used to be a daily risk. With Planlogi the scope for systematic error has been driven to practically zero, because the data is pulled onto the CMR straight from the order (customer, addresses, VINs, quantities).
"Our customers have actually pointed out, unprompted, that thanks to Planlogi our CMRs look really clean, tidy and informative."
Planlogi results in numbers
9× faster CMR creation — Producing one CMR used to take 9 minutes. Now the same consignment note is ready in 45 seconds. 92% saved on every CMR.
500 hours of work freed up per year that no longer go into manual data entry.
350+ vehicles a week managed in Planlogi with the transport data kept tidy in one system, searchable and ready for audit.
0 duplicate loads with wrong paperwork since the Planlogi rollout.
100% of CMRs from Planlogi — All of Sivitrans' CMR creation now runs through Planlogi.
Less stress and fewer fires to put out — The work is noticeably smoother and more predictable.
A more professional image in customers' eyes
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