Every day to Austria and Switzerland
Transport C. Vermeulen has been driving out of Hulshout since 1981. Constant Vermeulen started it as a one-man business, behind the wheel of the company’s only truck. It is still a family company today: Constant runs it, his daughter Inge leads dispatching and is the in-house ADR safety adviser, his daughter Ils handles the administration and his wife Rita keeps the books.
The business is built on one promise: daily groupage and part loads to Austria and Switzerland, with short transit times. Trucks also leave regularly for the rest of Western and Eastern Europe, together with long-standing partners.
It is not a simple freight profile. ADR, temperature-controlled, coils, express, food, tail-lift deliveries. Every shipment brings its own documents and its own rules. With a fleet of 25 tractors and 35 trailers, Vermeulen is big enough to be there every day, and small enough to know every customer personally.
Three people, one shared mailbox, no EDI
About 6,850 orders a year came in one way: as an email in a shared mailbox, with the order attached. No EDI, no portal. Three people in the office keyed everything into TAS by hand, together 1.5 FTE of order entry. The agreements with each customer lived in an Excel playbook that only they could read.
That was a lot of time for work that adds nothing. Every order meant reading, interpreting, looking up that customer’s agreements and retyping. When someone was ill or on leave, the work simply waited.
Summer was the pain point every year. Half the office on holiday, the same stream of orders, and a backlog that dragged on for weeks. Every new customer meant more data entry and more rules kept in people’s heads. Growing meant hiring someone for work nobody enjoys.
What Vermeulen needed was a way to get orders from the mailbox straight into TAS, attachments included, without turning the TMS or the way the team works upside down. And without months of implementation.
Five weeks from pilot to signed go-live
Vectrix reads the shared mailbox, takes the order out of the email and its attachment, applies Vermeulen’s customer agreements and creates the shipment in TAS. The attachments go along. Anything that doesn’t add up, or is missing, waits for a colleague. Everything that does, goes through.
The Excel playbook with the agreements per customer is now a tab in Vectrix. It keeps itself up to date, and Vermeulen edits it themselves. The team adds new customers on its own and sets them up with Vexi, the assistant in the platform, without Vectrix having to step in.
The TAS integration was built together with Sinari. Since go-live we refine it every week: customer-specific rules, addresses, packing groups for ADR.
The first summer without a backlog
Orders now arrive in TAS automatically, attachments included. The same three people still follow up order entry, but together it takes them 0.5 FTE instead of 1.5.
That is the business case: room to take on new volume, in any format, without thinking about an extra back-office hire. Vermeulen is growing — ten trucks joined the fleet in 2025 alone — and the office no longer has to grow in step. The knowledge about each customer no longer lives in people’s heads but in the system, and it scales with the company.
Vermeulen has since extended its credit pack.
Our transport orders land in our TMS automatically, attachments included. What really made the difference: no backlog this summer, with the office at half strength.
