NEW RELEASE: Expedock Launches FREIGHT AI AGENTS - FREYA & AI OUTLOOK AUTOMATION
Freight forwarders across Germany, Spain, France, and Italy are navigating a complex logistics landscape in 2025. Despite each country’s unique market, they share many of the same headaches, from labor shortages and customs bottlenecks to rising operational costs, fragmented documentation, and digitalization gaps. These challenges not only strain day-to-day operations but also squeeze margins and customer satisfaction. The good news? Offshoring has a smart way to tackle these issues head-on:
An aging workforce and insufficient new recruits have created a demographic crunch. For instance, in Germany nearly 45% of truck drivers are over the age of 55 and the story is similar in neighboring countries. In Italy and Spain, only about 2–3% of drivers are under 25, reflecting a dwindling influx of young talent. A recent industry survey found that 76% of logistics companies globally are struggling with labor shortages, with over one-third calling the shortage of drivers and warehouse workers “high to extreme”. This means delayed shipments, overworked staff, and ultimately, compromised customer service. It’s not just drivers either – freight forwarders are finding it hard to hire and retain people for back-office operations, like documentation and billing, which are crucial to keep shipments moving.
How Offshoring Helps: Offshoring offers a lifeline by expanding your talent pool beyond local constraints. Can’t find enough staff in Frankfurt or Marseille? You can offshore routine and support tasks to trained teams in regions where skilled labor is more plentiful. Many forwarders are now outsourcing paperwork processing, data entry, and customer service to professionals in countries with a strong logistics outsourcing industry (for example, in Southeast Asia). This has two big benefits: it fills the labor gap and reduces the burden on your in-house team. Your local staff can focus on high-value activities, while an offshore team or service handles the repetitive work. In fact, some forwarders have managed to operate 24/7 by using offshore support that works round the clock.
Freight forwarders in Europe’s big economies often handle imports and exports that must clear customs either within the EU or when trading globally. Even within the EU’s single market, complex documentation requirements and security checks can create bottlenecks. Shipments bound for (or coming from) outside the EU face a thicket of paperwork. Recent years have seen additional pressures like new digital customs systems and ever-changing trade regulations. For example, the EU’s new Import Control System 2 in 2024 requires detailed pre-declarations for air cargo, and any snag in providing that data can slow down deliveries. All these customs compliance tasks can bog down freight forwarders, leading to frustrated customers and storage fees as containers wait for clearance.
How Offshoring Helps: Offshoring can untangle the red tape by shifting the labor-intensive customs paperwork and compliance checks to specialized experts abroad. Imagine having a team of customs documentation specialists in a lower-cost location who work exclusively on ensuring every shipment’s papers are in order. Because they operate in different time zones, an offshore team can process tomorrow’s customs filings overnight so that by the time Europe wakes up, everything is ready for smooth clearance.
Fuel prices, for one, have been volatile and mostly high – diesel costs spiked dramatically in recent years, squeezing trucking budgets (Spain even saw a 20-day truckers’ strike in 2022 over record fuel prices, which disrupted deliveries nationwide). In Germany, early 2024 brought protests by haulage companies when the government cut diesel tax breaks, which threatened to raise operating costs. Beyond fuel, there are rising labor costs (especially when skilled workers are scarce, wages naturally climb), warehouse rents, insurance premiums, and technology investments needed to stay competitive. Add inflation into the mix and everything from vehicle maintenance to office electricity bills has become more expensive.
How Offshoring Helps: By relocating certain operations to countries with lower labor costs or more cost-efficient services, freight forwarders can dramatically cut expenses without sacrificing quality. For example, instead of hiring additional documentation clerks or customer service reps in France, a forwarder might outsource those functions to a team in a country where wages are a fraction of the cost. Many routine logistics support tasks can be done remotely. Offshoring these can yield labor cost savings of 40–80% for each task, which directly relieves pressure on your margins. Moreover, with an offshore partner handling back-office operations, you might also save on overhead like office space and equipment. Essentially, offshoring lets you do more with less – you retain reliable service levels and even scale up volume, but at a much lower incremental cost.
Every shipment generates a flurry of documents, which is often exchanged between multiple parties (shippers, carriers, agents, authorities). In Germany, Spain, France, Italy and beyond, forwarders often find themselves drowning in documentation, much of it still handled in old-fashioned ways. Different clients and carriers use different systems such as email threads, spreadsheets, and even fax to bring info to where it needs to go. Data from one system often has to be re-entered into another manually. The result is a fragmented process that eats up time and is prone to errors. According to one analysis, a typical freight operations or accounting staffer might spend 2–4 hours per day just entering and auditing data from documents into a transport management. The lack of a unified, streamlined documentation workflow is a huge operational drag on freight forwarders.
How Offshoring Helps: Instead of each branch or country office handling paperwork in its own ad-hoc way, you can outsource the document processing to a dedicated offshore team (or an AI-powered offshoring service) that specializes in freight documentation. Because they handle documentation for multiple clients or branches, they develop efficient routines and can often turn around paperwork much faster than a scattered in-house approach. This means fewer dreaded emails about “please resend form X” or frantic scrambles to find missing info. One CargoWise white paper noted that freight forwarders historically relied on paper-heavy workflows, but new automation can streamline operational processes and cut down labor costs. It’s like hiring a super-efficient “paperwork factory” abroad: You send them raw documents then they deliver an organized and accurate data into your system. Not only does this eliminate hours of manual work and reduce errors, but it also speeds up the whole shipment lifecycle.
While larger players are investing in digital platforms, there is a noticeable gap: smaller forwarders may lack the IT resources or know-how to fully digitalize their operations. This digital gap shows up in ways like lack of real-time visibility tools, manual tracking updates, reliance on email for crucial communications, and limited use of data analytics for decision-making. It became especially apparent during the COVID-19 pandemic when remote work highlighted which processes were still paper-bound. As one industry report noted, freight forwarding historically relied on paper documents, but the pandemic forced a push toward digital solutions to streamline workflows. Bridging this digitalization gap is thus a top challenge: forwarders know they need to modernize, but many struggle with where to start or how to afford it.
How Offshoring Helps: When you outsource, you indirectly leap onto their digital platform without having to build or buy it yourself. It’s like plugging your business into an advanced system overnight. Need a data analyst to make sense of shipment trends, or a developer to integrate your TMS with a new tracking API? Through offshoring, you can hire such experts on a contract or project basis much more affordably. Countries known for offshoring often have strong tech education (think of data specialists in the Philippines), and they can bring that expertise to your company. In short, offshoring helps level the playing field, even a smaller forwarder can implement digital tools and process automation by leveraging an offshore partner’s capabilities. Over time, you'll find your processes becoming more standardized, transparent, and scalable. tech-savvy is increasingly vital, offshoring is a shortcut to modernizing your operations without the usual high upfront investment. It’s a way to quickly move from outdated methods to a future-ready approach, powered by a global network of technology and talent.
Offshoring isn’t about “shipping jobs away”; it’s about working smarter and more globally. In the freight world, where timelines are tight and margins tighter, having an extended team of experts and AI tools around the world is like a secret weapon. It allows you to scale up without scaling costs at the same rate, to improve service without overburdening your local crew, and to adopt new technologies without the usual barriers.
By smartly outsourcing certain operations, freight forwarders can become more agile, cost-effective, and resilient in the face of industry headwinds. Recommendations for Forwarders: To turn these insights into action, here are some practical steps:
Our clients have reported major labor savings – doing the same work with far fewer hours and even growth in revenue by reallocating staff to more strategic tasks. Schedule a discovery call today.
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