Expert Talk: Bringing Digital Documentation in Shipping to Life
At Hapag-Lloyd our aim is to be your trusted partner in shipping. And in shipping, a partner is someone who makes every back and forth easier for you. Whether it's about getting a quote within seconds or being able to manage your shipping documentation process online: our tools offer convenience and flexibility. Which is why we are dedicating every day to bringing the best possible digital tools and solutions to you. This would not be possible without the dedicated people who pour their heart and soul into bringing our digital offerings to life. Two of these are Patrick Schuppius (Product Manager) and Felipe Machado (Product Owner), who are part of the team taking care of our Documentation tools in the web. In this Expert Talk they take you backstage of the processes that bring tools from the drawing board to your screen.
First of all, thank you for answering some questions about your daily work and how product creation works for our documentation tools. To warm up, please tell us a bit more about how your typical day at work looks like. Do you have any routines or daily tasks?
Felipe: A “typical” day is always different, but mostly I start my day by checking the calendar to get prepared for the meetings ahead. But I’d say, the biggest part of the job consists of coordination and communication through all sorts of alignment with our stakeholders, listening to suggestions for the product, seeking clarity, and reviewing processes – there’s always something new popping up.
And since we work in Product Owner and Product Manager tandems at Hapag-Lloyd, I probably talk more to Patrick than to my family.
Patrick: That’s right – we do talk a lot every day! Apart from talking to Felipe, my typical day usually starts with working on all the messages and emails which came in.
After covering that, I like to do an operation check: How healthy have BL Drafts and Shipping Instructions been in the last 24 hours? Which errors occurred? We have some dashboards to check this – and when we notice something fishy, we investigate it as a team and create fixes or adjustments. After that, it’s mostly collecting and structuring all the improvement ideas and requirements and aligning with different teams. Eventually these improvements will be developed by our great software developers, and we carefully test everything before rolling them out to the customers.
Since you both mentioned that aligning with other stakeholders is a huge part of your day – what would you say, how many people are generally involved in the entire process of bringing our tools to life and how do you align with all of them?
Felipe: Our core team, that works on documentation solutions, consists of 10 people: Developers, a Scrum Master, Designer, Patrick as the Product Manager, and me as Product Owner. But we obviously are working with other vital departments, too that are ultimately involved in promoting and maintaining the tools.
To align, we rely on classic Sprint models. The development stream is broken into pieces; we of course have a long-run vision for the products but always keeping some flexibility by working agile. The quarterly plans are more focused on the “real” outcomes that we want to achieve this quarter. This gets broken down into 2-week increments and work packets. When this time frame of 2 weeks is completed, we review the deliverables as the developers can showcase their amazing work, and everyone is welcome to join these sessions! But above all, communication is super important, as we don’t know everything, we don’t see a problem asking the experts. Especially when it comes to legal and compliance topics which are important to keep an eye on for such a bureaucratic topic like documentation.
In your opinion, what are challenges in creating tools to digitize vital shipping documentation that has been analogue for ages?
Felipe: Smoothly onboarding thousands of customers that are used to working with other tools for years is always a big challenge. They seek simplicity and efficiency, and it can be tough to adapt to new interfaces when it comes to such a fast-paced industry. So, my biggest learning is to create tools that are more intuitive and at least look somewhat familiar to our customers while making their lives easier, nonetheless.
Patrick: We try to make the solutions as intuitive as possible – but for someone who is just starting in logistics, it can still be a forest of special words and terms that you first have to learn about.
Another challenge for sure is also the automation: For the longest time, shipping instructions have been handled, at least partly, quite manually. We are slowly bringing more automation into the process – but it is a cumbersome pathway with a lot of effort involved.
We also see challenges in the nature of the products. For example, with Shipping Instructions, the process differs from channel to channel. While the form on the website has a clear set of validations that always apply, EDI messages can always be sent without any immediate validation preventing wrong or missing data. Another challenge arises out of the need to be compliant with legacy systems we still use. For example, we cannot enable special characters like ç or ü or letters with accents like á or ê. But as many addresses in the world use such characters, many customers would like to print them on the bill of lading. Navigating these legacy constraints often poses additional challenges to solve.
The next biggest challenge is the integration of all the individual local country rules. For example, some countries don't accept Sea Waybill. Or other countries require a freighted BL. Or they don't allow Collect Payment. In total, there are between 4000-5000 local rules across all countries of the world – and we cannot program all of those one by one.
Felipe Machado, Product Owner
[Customers] seek simplicity and efficiency, and it can be tough to adapt to new interfaces when it comes to such a fast-paced industry. So. [...] we create tools that are more intuitive.
That’s a lot of different departments and their requirements to keep in mind, indeed! How do you handle that – Keeping a balance between technical requirements, business priorities, and customer needs in your tools?
Patrick: In most cases, this ends up being simply a balance of work in every two-week iteration we do. While usually 60-70% of efforts go to customer features, 30-40 per cent often go for smaller improvements, architecture improvements, cleanups, library updates, security fixes and so on. Sometimes it can be a difficult negotiation and prioritization discussion every quarter. But we have found a good way of dialogue between technical developers and business owners – and there is a high level of mutual understanding for the different topics.
Felipe: I agree, it’s a constant balance, but the close collaboration keeps helping us make smart trade-offs instead of rushed ones. We always try to align by discussing priorities early, finding solutions that deliver value quickly for customers while still respecting the technicalities behind the scenes.
Patrick Schuppius, Product Manager
We have achieved a lot in the last years, but there are also still many exciting ideas for new solutions in the air that I am deeply looking forward to!
So, a lot of alignment again. Let’s focus a bit more on the actual products. What excites you the most about the digital tool portfolio at Hapag-Lloyd?
Felipe: The big range of possibilities. Our core business is to transport boxes from point A to B, and not much will change there, so we can be disruptive in an industry that is not known for being modern. Digital solutions are the path for doing something new, for changing how we interact with customers and how to exceed expectations outside the operational stream. A lot has changed, and a lot more will come; ideas are plentiful.
Patrick: For me, it is especially exciting to work with a modern tech stack and a fully cloud-native infrastructure. Compared to older solutions built 10 or 20 years ago, there is almost infinite freedom and possibilities for what you can do. Also, I find it really exciting how the importance of our web solutions has evolved over time: When I started in 2015, the digital solutions on our website were still a small side-channel. Right now, they are often the main channel for business processes. We have achieved a lot in the last years, but there are also still many exciting ideas for new solutions in the air that I am deeply looking forward to.
There seems to be a lot going on! Are there any measures in place to gather and implement customer feedback to make these challenges less cumbersome, and what are you prioritizing to make the tools more user-friendly?
Felipe: Unfortunately, we don’t have direct contact with customers on a daily basis, but we are constantly checking what customers are saying when using the feedback widget on our tools. Those comments give us really good data on how they perceive Shipping Instructions and BL Drafts. Also, we strongly rely on all insights possible from customer service teams, and the UX team supports us by having dedicated interviews with customers, which are also incredibly useful in our decision-making. And basically, all the features we developed are shaped based on customer needs.
Patrick: We also use different reports and dashboards which measure many aspects of our application usage: How often which features are used, how long certain processes take, which channels are used, how often and much more. With these dashboards, we can track the development over time and measure also the impact our new features are making. In terms of improvements, we are working on many different detail fronts here. One aspect for sure is to increase the percentage of SIs which are processed fully automatic, until and including that the first draft BL is distributed to the customer for review. In an ideal scenario, this does not even take one minute from the point in time that the SI was submitted. Today, this works only for a lower percentage of SIs, but we have many ideas in mind on how to get that share higher and higher.
And is there anything that you can share that will be coming for the documentation solutions in 2026?
Felipe: We will try to focus on further technical things that, unfortunately, end up not being seen internally or externally by doing some backend housekeeping. Our idea is that customers will always be informed by the system already when something is not possible if the origin or destination country have specific regulations, for example. On top of that, next year we will also have dedicated mobile solutions for the Shipping Instructions and BLDA.
Patrick: We have various improvements on our roadmap – like better support for condensed BLs, more live validations of country-specific rules and especially better support for the release handling of the final BLs. That last part is still a big gap in our solution and causes many phone calls and emails – which we want to change of course. For our Web SI, we are also thinking of various features to make it quicker and easier to fill out the form. For example, an “address book” with favorite parties for filling the shipper / consignee / notify details is planned. But also many country-specific validations need to be integrated still, or a better support for special scenarios like split BL instructions or DG declarations are on the roadmap. A good digital SI tool can make the entire documentation process smooth and easy for both sides, and this is something we want to achieve both for our customers and ourselves.
That sounds like an exciting year ahead for Documentation. Thank you so much for your time to answer our questions and also for shaping the products together with your team!
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