How Logistics Teams Can Reduce Manual Paperwork and Shipment Delays
Addressing manual paperwork is as much a means of improving administrative inefficiencies as it is a way to increase supply chain...
U.S. Customs and Border Protection processes more than 3 million shipments per day, each one requiring multiple documents to clear authorities. At the end of 2025, NBC reported that thousands of U.S.-bound UPS packages were stuck in hubs because they didn’t meet the new customs and duties requirements set by the Trump administration.
Shipment rules are in a state of flux, which manual paperwork is ill-equipped to keep place with. If even one document is missing or incorrectly filled out, it can result in shipments being significantly delayed. To avoid these issues, it’s vital that businesses understand where and how manual paperwork causes delays, and the broader operational consequences.
With a few simple strategies, it’s possible to digitize paperwork and keep shipment documents moving as quickly as the shipments themselves.
Sending a form digitally isn’t the same as making it completable. A flat PDF still gets printed, filled in by hand, scanned and uploaded, and each of those steps is somewhere a single keying error can restart the cycle. Most shipping paperwork is standard enough that this is a one-time fix. A logistics team can remove the loop for a whole document class in an afternoon by building a fillable PDF from the form already in use, so the data is captured at source and stays machine-readable. These are the micro costs of manual paperwork, and they add up.
This story was originally published by SupplyChainBrain. Read the full story at SupplyChainBrain →
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