Moving a freight forwarder to a new system in a single day

On 30 September we switched them from their legacy system to a modern cloud platform. The old system was frozen at 08:00. By the end of the day, three and a half years of shipments were live in the new one.

The situation

The business imports by sea and road, mostly from Turkey and Poland, and handles customs clearance. It runs on two people.

• The old system was installed on a single office machine. It could only be reached on the office network, and getting data out meant working directly with its database.
• The new platform had already been paid for. It had sat unused for eight months because nobody had the time to move years of jobs across.
• Every new job was being keyed by hand from printed documents, so the admin load stayed the same even as the team got smaller.

The brief was simple to say and hard to do: move the work across, keep the history, and don't stop the business.

What we did

We treated the switchover like any operational change: plan it, rehearse it, then run it in small, checked steps.

1. Got the data out. We extracted every job created since January 2023 straight from the old system's database, along with containers, charges and contacts.
2. Mapped it across. Each field in the old system was matched to its place in the new one, from clients and suppliers to bills of lading, vessels, ports and charge codes.
3. Loaded the reference data first. Contacts and charge codes went in before any shipments, so every job had something to link to.
4. Rehearsed it. The whole load ran in a test copy of the new platform first, so problems surfaced there and not in the live system.
5. Ran it live in stages. On the day, live jobs went in first, ten at a time to start with, then the history in larger batches. Each stage was checked before the next began.
6. Checked every field. Every job was read back from the new platform and compared field by field against the original.

What the data threw at us

Old systems hold years of real-world shortcuts, and the new platform had stricter rules. Our rule was never to invent data to make it fit.

• Several jobs on one bill of lading. The new platform groups these under a single master, and a later job could overwrite the first job's details. We changed the load so each group kept its original values.
• Departure dates after arrival dates. Around 30 jobs had dates typed the wrong way round. We kept the arrival date, which matters for imports, and listed the rest for the client.
• Duplicates and typos. Containers listed twice on the same job, and a few mistyped job numbers, were each handled and logged.
• A batch that didn't land. A check the day after go-live found containers missing from some jobs. We traced the cause, fixed it and re-loaded them the same afternoon.

Every adjustment went on a list for the client, so nothing changed without them knowing.

The result

Shipments moved	5,189
Live jobs, ready to invoice	164, with 564 charge lines
History since January 2023	5,025 jobs, closed
Containers attached	Over 4,000
Contacts and charge codes set up	252 contacts, 61 charge codes
Field-by-field checks	Over 120,000
Switchover	One day, with the old system frozen at 08:00

Every job keeps its old job number, so the team can still find work by the numbers they already know.

Why this matters for your business

We don't need to know your industry inside out to fix how it runs. We need to understand where the time goes.

Most owner-led businesses have a version of this problem: an old system nobody wants to touch, software already paid for and never set up, or data spread across spreadsheets and inboxes. The same approach applies every time: get the data out, map it properly, rehearse, then switch over in checked steps without stopping the work.

If you have a system you've outgrown, or one you've paid for and never used, get in touch. We'll tell you honestly what it would take.