From scattered proof-of-delivery documents to a searchable customer portal

At a glance

• Starting point: A pharma logistics provider received proof-of-delivery documents from several clients in three different formats, unsorted and with no link to order or client.
• Solution: Three background services read, standardise and match the documents automatically via the order number; a multi-tenant portal makes them searchable.
• Outcome: The internal tidy-up has become a self-service tool that's been running in production for years, and one the provider now offers its own customers.

The starting point

A pharma logistics provider ships medicines on behalf of several clients, each an independent pharmaceutical company in Germany and Austria. Every delivery generates a proof of delivery (POD). In regulated pharma distribution, that record isn't optional: it has to be matched to the right order, retained and findable on request.

The problem was how different the sources were. Each carrier delivered its records in a completely different shape: one as PDF documents, another as TIFF image files inside ZIP archives with an accompanying CSV, each with its own file naming, its own reference numbers and its own date conventions. The records arrived at different times and landed in one shared pool, with no link to order or client. Manually, that's neither searchable nor separable by client, and every additional client and carrier adds more than linear effort.

Our approach

Rather than building three separate point solutions, we designed one system. We started by analysing the sources and looking for a common denominator that could match every document uniquely: the order number kept by the provider's SAP-backed warehouse management system. The whole pipeline is built around that one anchor.

The solution

Three background services each connect to one source and feed it into a single, unified target:

• Ingest and deduplicate. Each service pulls its files over SFTP, recognises deliveries already processed, and archives the source data before processing. No document gets imported twice, none get lost.
• Standardise. ZIP archives get unpacked, TIFF images converted to PDF, and every document renamed to one consistent scheme: client, date, shipment and order number.
• Match via the order number. Documents are matched against SAP exports from the warehouse management system and assigned to the right client and order. Anything without a clear match moves to a review folder instead of getting lost.
• Catch late arrivals. Because shipping data and warehouse exports don't arrive in sync, the system keeps reprocessing a delivery over a configurable time window. Latecomers still find their order.
• File and log. Matched documents sit in the central pool in a clear structure by client, carrier, year and month, with a traceable log. The whole process runs fully automatically every fifteen minutes, with retry logic and transfer checks.

For one client with its own IT department, we followed the path all the way through: its matched documents are also transferred automatically to its own systems, kept separate by country subsidiary.

From obligation to added value

On top of the organised pool, we built a multi-tenant web portal. Every one of the provider's customers sees only its own records. They search in real time by shipment or order number and date, download individual documents or put together whole collections and pull them as a ZIP file, around the clock, in two languages.

That flips the whole logic of the task. What started as an internal tool for sorting documents is now a standalone self-service the provider offers its customers as part of its service. A compliance obligation became a sales argument.

The outcome

• Records from multiple shipping sources in different formats, standardised fully automatically and matched to the right client via the order number.
• Searchable, kept separate by client, filed traceably, retained for the required period.
• Round-the-clock self-service instead of manual requests to the provider.
• Running in production for years, the oldest component since 2019, and extendable to new carriers or clients without touching the core.

What this story shows

The core of it wasn't a single format or a single interface. The core was thinking about the whole system: connecting sources, levelling out the differences, matching cleanly, and delivering the result so a customer can use it themselves. That's exactly the software missing between the systems already in place.

We've summed up what a digital proof of delivery fundamentally needs to do in a separate guide, and how we work as an IT service provider for pharma logistics is on our pharma page.