How Polaris Transportation Group Automated 85% of Customs Clearance with UiPath
Polaris Transportation Group, a North American LTL cross-border freight carrier, deployed UiPath automation across customs clearance, order creation, and freight documentation workflows. The program automated 85% of customs documents, reduced order creation time by 90%, and enabled 30% of orders to flow through with no employee intervention.
Impact
85%
Customs documents cleared automatically
30%
Orders with no employee intervention
90%
Reduction in order creation time
Hours to minutes
Reduction in bill of lading reconciliation time
Challenge
Polaris Transportation Group’s cross-border freight operations depended on manual document handling for customs clearance, order creation, and bill of lading reconciliation — creating errors, delays, and a workforce spending most of its time on low-value administrative tasks.
Solution
Polaris deployed UiPath automation and Document Understanding via a managed services partnership with qBotica, automating customs document processing, email-based order creation, and freight document reconciliation across its cross-border operations.
Tools & Technologies
What Leaders Say
“Employees were touching documents two, three, four times and still making a lot of errors, which made the freight movement a poor experience for a lot of our customers.”
“We’ve gone from moving an order from 15 to 20 minutes on average down to two to three minutes, or less in some cases, if the data is really clear and nobody touches it.”
“The AI agents can read the document word-for-word and put it into our system. With that, the accuracy matches exactly what the customer has requested. Nobody typed it, hence errors from human processing, mistakes, and disputes are avoided because what we show them is exactly what was sent.”
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Full Story
Polaris Transportation Group runs cross-border freight operations between Canada and the United States in the less-than-truckload (LTL) market — one of the most time-sensitive and document-intensive segments in logistics. Every shipment generates customs paperwork, order data, and freight documentation that must be processed accurately and quickly to keep freight moving. In a market where digital-first competitors are raising the bar, manual document handling was a structural disadvantage.
Before automation, Polaris employees touched documents two, three, or four times per shipment and still produced errors that degraded the customer experience. Order creation from unstructured email took 15 to 20 minutes per order. Customs documentation was processed manually, adding delays to time-critical cross-border shipments. Bill of lading reconciliation at the trailer level required several people working five to six hours each night. The business ran on skilled people doing low-value administrative work.
Polaris partnered with qBotica, a managed services provider, to deploy automation built on the UiPath Platform across its core operational workflows. Customs documents are now classified, validated, and processed automatically using qBotica’s Document AI service powered by UiPath Document Understanding — with exceptions routed to staff only when required. Order creation automation reads incoming email, extracts relevant data, and creates orders end-to-end when the information is complete. Bill of lading documents arriving with freight are now automatically aligned to orders in the transportation management system, triggering customs clearance and invoicing while shipments are still in transit.
The results were significant across every automated workflow: 85% of customs documents now clear automatically, order creation time dropped from 15–20 minutes to under two minutes, 30% of orders require no employee intervention, and trailer-level bill of lading reconciliation that took a team several hours now completes in minutes. The accuracy improvement is equally notable — documents are processed exactly as received, eliminating disputes caused by manual transcription errors.
Polaris is now extending its automation foundation toward AI-driven orchestration for quoting workflows, using qBotica’s agent platform built on UiPath to assess incoming requests, apply dynamic pricing logic, and respond to customers more consistently. The five-year automation buildout positions Polaris to compete with digital-first freight platforms on operational capability rather than just asset scale.