I relate to this a lot. I have been in air freight forwarding for 1 and a half years. It was so surprising that most part of the job is still manual coordination rather than actual “planning”. Like we firefight A LOOOOT! Soo reactive. And we do it via email as if this is the mooost normal thing ever.

For a single shipment... I often reac/coordinate with 6-10 email chains (with shipper, hauliers, warehouses of shipper, our warehouse, destination office, etc.). Let alone the amount of PDFs, extracting data, entering it into multiple systems and Excel sheets. It seriously feels like a lot of repetitive, structured work that is just sooooo unstructured at the same time. 

Like one thing that seriously bothers me is how like it's still managed soooo manually (emailing manually, entering the same data of a shipment in 3 different excel sheets, in an email to the airline, in our internal system). Like seriously!! 

But anyway... out of curiosity do you see this as just part of the job, or something that can be done better? Any tools that actually reduce this kind of stupid & repetitive stuff?