Fixing Paperwork Risk to Boost Supply Chain Resilience

What if the biggest threat to your supply chain isn’t a typhoon, strike, or cyberattack, but a mistyped HS code?

This week I’m joined by Yeelen Knegtering, Co-Founder and CEO of Klippa, a company tackling one of the most underestimated risks in global trade: the explosion of paperwork, compliance demands, and manual processes that quietly delay planes, stall ships, burn carbon, and drain margin. With regulations tightening and documentation growing faster than teams can manage, this matters more than ever for anyone trying to build a resilient, low-risk, low-carbon supply chain.

In this conversation, you’ll hear how tiny admin errors cascade into multi-million-euro failures, and why most organisations still don’t see the danger until it hits them. We break down why specialised AI (not generic LLMs) is starting to transform document-heavy workflows, cutting delays, cost, and emissions at the same time. You might be surprised to learn how many shipments are returned or destroyed simply because paperwork wasn’t processed in time - and how automating even part of that work unlocks resilience far beyond compliance.

We also dig into workforce impact, reskilling, and the uncomfortable truth: paperwork volumes are rising, not falling, and companies who ignore this layer of risk are already paying for it.

🎙️ Listen now to hear how Yeelen and Klippa are reshaping the future of supply chain resilience, sustainability, and operational truth.

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Transcript

Yeelen: 0:03

The impact of not doing these paper processes can have very significant consequences and it can be as simple as packages that are being sent across borders that don't have to correct HS codes, for example, and they're being destroyed or being returned. But it can also be flights or entire ships being delayed because dangerous goods forms are not filled in.

Tom Raftery: 0:28

Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, wherever you are in the world. Welcome to episode 97 of the Resilient Supply Chain Podcast. I'm your host, Tom Raftery. Now some supply chain failures explode into view with a grounded vessel, a strike, a cyber attack. But many of the most expensive ones start with something far smaller, a mistyped HS code, a missing dangerous goods form, a compliance check, no one had time to finish. And while leaders obsess over AI and visibility, the administrative backbone of global trade is still overwhelmingly manual, increasingly regulated, and now a material source of risk, cost, and carbon. So how do you build resilience when the paperwork layer the least glamorous part of the system, is also the one most likely to break it. To explore this, I'm joined by Yeelen Knegtering, co-founder and CEO of Klippa, who has spent the past decade tackling these document heavy workflows. Not with hype, but with practical automation that reduces errors, delays, and waste at scale. And a reminder, if you want full access to all 450 plus past episodes of this podcast with supply chain leaders shaping the future of supply chain resilience, plus a direct line to me for ideas, guests, and new directions, you can find the Resilient Supply Chain Plus subscribe link in the show notes. Now Yeelen, welcome to the podcast. Would you like to introduce yourself?

Yeelen: 2:05

Tom, thank you for having me. My name is, Yeelen. I'm one of the founders of a company called, Klippa, and we specialise in intelligent document processing and one of our big customer audiences is logistics and supply chain. So yeah, looking forward to talking today.

Tom Raftery: 2:21

Okay, Yeelen, and tell me a little bit more about the company, where you're based, what markets are you addressing what's your turnover, all that kind of thing.

Yeelen: 2:32

Yeah, of course. So Klippa is originally from the Netherlands. There's a small city in the north of the Netherlands called Groningen, which is always very hard to pronounce for non-natives. That's where we started the company 10 years ago. But we also have an office in Amsterdam, which is a little bit more familiar to most people. We have an office in Romania, in Brasov. And since the beginning of this year, we are part of SER Group. And SER has. Offices in 20 locations across the world. So yeah, basically global presence.

Tom Raftery: 3:00

Okay, superb and number of staff, turnover, that kind of thing?

Yeelen: 3:05

Yeah. So, we have approximately a hundred people in the Klippa organisation and close to a thousand in the entire SER Group. If you look at Klippa revenue is close to 20 million, but in SER Group, it's in the hundreds of millions.

Tom Raftery: 3:18

Okay, fantastic. And you've got a Chief Distraction Officer Femca.

Yeelen: 3:22

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. So we, we have a very modern culture here so people can bring their their dogs and well, research also shows that the dogs can really help improve the office vibe. So, yeah, we have actually three dogs walking around here.

Tom Raftery: 3:37

Oh, there's only one of them on the website. Okay. You have time to update the website. Great. Fantastic. So tell me Yeelen, what first got you interested in tracking the world of paperwork and document processing?

Yeelen: 3:54

That's always a, a very good question because there's not many kids that grow up and they say later I will start a company in document processing. And that's also not how I started in this industry. I did know already that I wanted to be an entrepreneur. But I was actually in a marketing, consulting company one that's now part of Accenture. And when I was working there as a consultant, you always get judged based on your billable hours. So basically they want you to get as close to a hundred percent billable hours as possible. And I was always doing good but still there was always a conversation on how can we do more billable hours? And I came from a a study that was information science, so you can become a programmer if you want to, but you can also be more into the IT consulting direction. And I basically pitched to my employer at the time, if you want more billable hours, then why don't you take away all the work that is not important work? But we do have to do, as consultants, we have to register the hours, we have to do expenses, we have to approve invoices, we have to enter credit card details into Facebook billing platforms you name it, a whole range of manual activities that we had to do. And the response of my employer was basically, well, yeah, that's a great idea, but we have no idea how to do that. So I told them, okay, if I would build something that does that for you, would, would you be a customer? Yeah. And that's basically what got my company started. And so that employer became our first POC customer. I got some friends involved that are way better programmers than me. And I always say that got a little bit out of control till what we do today.

Tom Raftery: 5:27

And from your perspective, why are manual paper-based processes still such a headache for supply chains in 2025?

Yeelen: 5:40

At the end of the day, most paper processes come from regulatory compliance type of reasons. So I always say that the more rules and regulations there are in the industry, the more relevant the offerings we have are for a certain industry. And logistics and supply chain, I bundle that as, as being part of the same category is one of the most regulated industries because it's of course about cross border trade. There's customs. And therefore it's a highly regulated industry which makes manual workflows extremely common. And therefore it's an interesting audience for us.

Tom Raftery: 6:16

That's fair. And obviously most people think of paperwork as boring admin, but as you said there in supply chains in logistics, not doing it can mean fines, delays, or even reputational damage. So have you any examples you've seen of paperwork not being done actually breaking a supply chain?

Yeelen: 6:40

Yeah, absolutely. So I would say almost all the paperwork is work that people have to do that they don't want to do. But the impact of not doing these paper processes can have very significant consequences and it can be as simple as packages that are being sent across borders that don't have to correct HS codes, for example, and they're being destroyed or being returned. But it can also be flights or entire ships being delayed because dangerous goods forms are not filled in. Yeah. So simple paperwork mistakes can have real significant impacts in the real world.

Tom Raftery: 7:18

And, do you have any real world examples of how outdated paperwork has caused fines or reputational damage in supply chains?

Yeelen: 7:29

Yeah. So I think if you look at postal companies for example, they usually give guarantees to governments. So if you take the Dutch post companies called PostNL as an example, they need to deliver x percent of their packages between, 24 hours and 36 hours. So it's something like that. And if they don't reach that milestone, then they have to pay the government a fine because they basically have a monopoly on the service. So the service needs to be at a certain level. But part of the packages are, are of course, cross border packages they come from outside of the EU, the UK China can be from anywhere. So they have back office teams doing HS code processing, for example making sure that all the packages that come into the EU or in this case the Netherlands, for example, actually comply with the tax regulations and with everything involved basically. Usually packages come in peak volumes. So think about Christmas time, for example, or think about low season in the summertime. But people do not scale. So it's very hard for these types of organisations to maintain a consistent workforce, but have a very variable workload. But still, if they do not deliver on this consistent outcome, they will get huge fines. And I think last year PostNL got fined multiple millions, for example, for not delivering on their guarantees.

Tom Raftery: 8:47

Wow. And obviously we're seeing regulations tightening globally. We're also seeing tariffs being implemented. How big of a compliance burden are companies facing right now?

Yeelen: 9:02

I think especially in the, in the EU, but with tariffs in the US it's also growing there. It has been a growing problem over the last 10, 20 years. So, governments like to say always that they try to make it easy on businesses, but I would say in reality it's usually the inverse of that. So they keep adding new rules, new regulations CSRD ESG reporting that only adds on the paperwork and adds on the burden. And of course, there can be very valid reasons, right? That these regulations are introduced, but they definitely don't make business easier. And they also also don't make the manual work people have to do less.

Tom Raftery: 9:40

Okay. And do you see regulation as a burden or as a driver of innovation? I mean, obviously in your case it's a driver of innovation for Klippa, but in general.

Yeelen: 9:50

Yeah, it's a very valid question Tom, and I think it's a two sided coin. So as an entrepreneur, I generally see them as a burden. They don't make it easier for companies to be successful. There's definitely countries outside of the EU that have lower barriers to entry because they have less regulation, for example. if you want to be a front runner in certain areas for example, in the environmental impact that your companies have, you sometimes need to force action on companies. And this is of course also where regulations come in. I think the trick here is how can you make regulation that does force companies to move into the right direction without making a significant burden on top of all the work that they already have to do because at the end of the day, all these additional work streams that they have to do because of new regulations, they don't drive economic growth. They drive compliance. They might drive certain innovation, but they don't drive growth. I would actually say that they might limit growth.

Tom Raftery: 10:50

Okay. Okay. There's a lot of debate now about the if we talk about AI for a minute, because I know that's a big part of what Klippa does. You're using AI a lot, so there's a lot of debate around AI, about its environmental footprint. How do you reconcile that with its potential to make supply chains more sustainable?

Yeelen: 11:15

No, that, that's a very valid topic because at one side, of course technology and specifically AI has high power consumption. Now, I do think it's important that you make a distinction between, you have general AI, so like LLMs like ChatGPT, for example, which are basically using a hammer to drive a screw or using a hammer to to build something like a skyscraper. And. The energy consumption of these types of models is very significant compared to the actual output that they deliver. But if you look at specialised AI models, so, purpose-built models, and that's more the industry that we are in. So we built purpose built models for, for example, processing financial documents automatically, processing identity documents automatically processing, dangerous goods forms automatically. These are very specific models that are maybe 1000th or even less of the size of these general models. So the power consumption is a lot, lot lower. So I think in the general debate, this nuance is usually left out because of course you need some more technical knowledge to understand this. And if you host these, very specific models in cloud environments that are CO2 neutral, for example then you don't introduce additional carbon footprint into the mix, but you can use those algorithm to reduce carbon footprint on the other side. So by effectively applying these algorithms, you can reduce the amount of paper that's necessary. You can reduce packages that are unnecessarily being sent and returned. You can reduce delays in shipments where ships or containers are waiting for the paperwork to be processed, but while ships are waiting in the docks, generally they have their engines running 24 hours a day. So the positive impact that you can make really outweighs, I would say the negative impact, especially if you choose for purpose-built models that run on environmentally friendly ecosystems.

Tom Raftery: 13:08

Okay. And do you have any examples you can share of where AI cut both cost and carbon?

Yeelen: 13:16

Yeah, so I would say one of our customers is GLS, so a big package delivery company as well. And there we help them automate HS code recognition and processing in their tax office. So this also has to do with clearing packages from outside of the EU, for example, getting them into the EU. So. For a packaging company. But that's the same for a transportation company that is just the cost center because they have to do this to do their work. And they have a whole group of staff doing it. So by automating part of that work, they can reduce the labor force that they put on that, those people can do something else, something that adds more value to the organisation. And at the same time, they can prevent packages that are being unnecessarily sent and returned. And I think the biggest waste that there might be is sending something from China to, let's say, Germany, and then realising that you have to send it back because the paperwork is not correct. Well, you could identify that the paperwork is not correct before the package is being sent and just not accept the package in the process at all. The turnaround time of these types of processes is not real time if people are doing the work because people are only working from eight to five, but the packages travel around the world 24 7.

Tom Raftery: 14:27

Okay. Yeah, sure. How do then employees respond when the repetitive bits of their jobs get automated away? Is it relief? Is it fear? Is it a bit of both?

Yeelen: 14:40

I would say it's a bit of both. And I think with every major shift you have people that are supporting the innovation and you have people that are fearful of the innovation. In my personal opinion, fighting innovation generally it doesn't work because it doesn't stop the innovation from happening. So the best thing you can do usually is embrace it, learn how to use the technology, be a front runner in the technology. And of course there is work that will be automated that people do not have to do anymore. But this is the work that most people don't want to do at all anyway. That's also why a lot of European, but also North American companies have outsourced this work to low labor countries because one, cost of course is a lot lower there, but, but on the other hand, many people in European countries or North American countries don't want to do that work at all anyway. So taking that part of the work out and making work more fulfilling and allowing people to spend time on more value adding tasks, I think is very important. And in the economy that we work in right now, there's already a big shortage in people. So it's not that when you can save some work here, you don't need the people at all. You usually already have a lot of open vacancies where you can ideally use these people in other positions and do a lot more value adding tasks.

Tom Raftery: 15:54

Okay. And what role does training or re-skilling play here?

Yeelen: 16:00

So yeah, if you want to be a front runner, you want to adapt technology, you definitely have to re-skill people because instead of, for example, processing the documents manually themselves, they're going to run AI agents that are doing a lot of this work for them. Then there will still be like a certain dropout rate that they will have to process, for example. But 90% of the work that they used to do, they do not have to do anymore. And they have to, for example work as orchestrators of these agents, or they have to go into completely different vacancies in an organisation. And then you also have to do reskilling. But I would say any organisation that wants to survive in the next 30 years has to invest in reskilling their people anyway, because AI is going to go into every part of work in the next and 30 years is actually a really long time. In the next five years, it'll already make a huge, huge impact. But if you wanna be here for the next 30 years, you have to invest now.

Tom Raftery: 16:56

And do you think companies underestimate the carbon and financial costs of admin work?

Yeelen: 17:03

Yeah, I do think so because it's very hard for companies usually to identify how much of this work there actually is. So if you ask an organisation, for example, how many documents do you actually process? Or how much do you actually print? Many organisations don't really know and even if you try and dig through it, they will come to you with, let's say two or three processes that are really their core business. But then when you start digging and asking more questions, you end up with 10 or 20 or 30 workflows that actually include different types of documents, approvals, and data entry. But some of those are just so niche and specific, they only happen in one department or only happen in one country that they're not top of mind for global leadership. But if we think about only supply chain, for example, there's billions of documents being processed in that industry alone on a yearly basis. And that's like a very low end estimate of that. So we are really talking huge, huge volumes

Tom Raftery: 18:01

And is the majority of that to do with compliance or something else? And following on from that, the amount of regulations is only going upwards. So, while we thought back in the eighties and nineties, we were heading into a paperless world. In fact, it's going the other direction, isn't it?

Yeelen: 18:23

Yeah, so, so most research shows indeed that paper work is still growing instead of reducing. Now that has multiple reasons. Of course the global population is still growing, so the amount of cross border transportation is also still growing. There's an increase, of course, in global trade as well. And this global trade is a big part of all this documentation because a lot of the compliance documentation that are involved in logistics and supply chain is caused by regulations of the EU or North American regulations or the world customs organisation. So yeah, regulations play a huge role in this, and it's definitely not decreasing. It is still increasing. And of course, there's always a lot of initiatives to harmonise these streams of documents and create digital networks. And I think e-invoicing is one example of these networks, right, where we say, what if we just exchange all these documents in a digital format? And I think it's a great initiative, but the issue then is, even if it's digital, it's still not uniform. Every country makes their own format. Even within the EU, the, the EU has a network called Peple, but America has its own network, and then China has its own network and India has its own network. So it's, it's just almost impossible, apparently for people to come to one consensus that really allows us to do it in a way that is uniform. And yeah. Therefore, we are still stuck in the, in the paper chaos.

Tom Raftery: 19:47

Which is good for you.

Yeelen: 19:49

Which is good for us because that is of course, where we run our business. But for us, it doesn't really matter actually how you share documents with your customers or partners.'cause whether you're, they are in a digital form, in a paper form, whether they're on the, in e-invoicing network, we try to be basically an independent vendor. We offer all of these options. So the, the source of the document and the format of the document is for us, irrelevant. We focus more on what process do you do with this document and how can we automate that so much more an end-to-end process.

Tom Raftery: 20:19

Okay. And do you see the biggest opportunities for AI then to move the needle on supply chain sustainability in the next few years?

Yeelen: 20:29

Ooh, that's a good question. I would say that optimising transport routes is probably one that if you are talking about the environment, can make the biggest impact. There's of course still a lot of transportation that is not maximised. So the utility is not that a hundred percent. There's trucks driving around that go full in one direction and go empty or partially empty in the other direction. I think the more transparent the market becomes and the better AI becomes, we can optimise these routes. We can do co shipments and try to get the utility of trucks, but the same for trains and, and planes, et cetera, to a much higher percentage. And at the end of the day, that is where the biggest ecological footprint, of course is from our consumption. So I would say yeah, the biggest impact can be made there.

Tom Raftery: 21:17

So if you had a magic wand, what's the one part of the supply chain you'd automate tomorrow to make the whole system greener?

Yeelen: 21:25

Ooh. Um. I think sea transportation. I think that is, if you break it down, is the biggest one of all of them. So either I would have to magically turn all the ship engines into solar powered engines. But I think that will take take a long time. But that, I would say that is the, that is where I would invest.

Tom Raftery: 21:47

Okay. If you had to make a bold prediction for supply chains of 2030, what would it be?

Yeelen: 21:54

Bold prediction. I would predict that the compliance pressure increases even further. And that even though people think we are progressing we'll be looking back in 2030 thinking, oh, in 2025, it was not that bad. Actually, these new regulations only made it worse.

Tom Raftery: 22:13

Okay. What advice would you give to supply chain executives who want to leverage AI but are worried about greenwashing or over promising?

Yeelen: 22:25

I always really believe that you have to test, drive technology. So you have to try it and also see it, to believe it. And especially in industries that can be a little bit more conservative. I think people tend to not even start trying. So, and if you don't see it, then sometimes you don't believe it because technology is of course you can't touch it, right? So it's very hard for some people to see the value in it. So. I would always say you have to invest in trying things to see if and how they can work for you. The worst thing that can happen is that you learn something and you don't find the perfect solution. But whether it's today, whether it's in a year from now, whether it's in five years from now. There's definitely solutions out there that can help you solve your problems. Start test, drive them, find the value, and implement afterwards. So do, do good POCs work together with, vendors that are quick on their feet. I would not move too much with the real legacy players that bill per hour. You know, find vendors that are committed to billing you on outcomes, for example. So you have very good alignment of of interest. And then I, I am a hundred percent sure that for almost any problem, there is a technological solution out there.

Tom Raftery: 23:36

Nice. Okay. If listeners were to take one thing away from this conversation about AI and sustainability and supply chains, what would it be?

Yeelen: 23:45

I think the impact is, can be made on any level. So whether it's the paperwork that you're doing, whether it is optimising the transportation routes, or how do you do your purchasing, it can be made on any level. So don't just focus on one level and make sure that you really think through all the levels of the organisation where you can make impact. And that's, that's how we can progress together.

Tom Raftery: 24:08

Okay, A left field question for you Yeelan. If you could have any person or character, alive or dead, real or fictional, as a champion for automating supply chains, who would it be and why?

Yeelen: 24:24

Wow. That's a, that's a complicated question. I, I believe that mascots are real powerful because people like to, uh. like to engage with something that is close to them, that they can hold in their hands, that they that they can see their children play with it. So as a industry, you know, introducing a, a mascot that, that, focuses on that specific message that everybody would know. I think that that would be really powerful. And, and, yeah. Whether that is a fictional character or one that's that is that is actually in one of the popular cartoons of today, doesn't really matter, but, but I think as an industry it's really nice to have, have one of these characters. I dunno if you know Bucky's for example, but Bucky's is a gas station in in Texas and it's, it is, they have like a, yeah, I dunno if it's a rat or it's something like that. And people go completely crazy about it. But it's just a gas station where you can, well buy certain foods as well, but somehow it's a unique experience because of the, the character 'cause of Bucky. And I think that's, that's a very strong.

Tom Raftery: 25:27

Yeelen. We're coming towards the end of the podcast now. Is there any question that I didn't ask that you wish I did or any aspect of this we haven't touched on that you think it's important for people to be aware of?

Yeelen: 25:40

Because software is so intangible, I always like to make it a little bit more tangible. And in this case, talking about the scale of, of documents. So if you look at, at Klippa, we process hundreds of millions of documents in a year, but for people it's very hard to see how much is that really? Well, the, the global volume is in the tens or hundreds of billions, but if you take approximately a hundred million documents, you can already go around the world once. So only in our company, we go around the world multiple times a year in pure document volume. Yeah, take the global volumes in the tens of billions, then we can almost go to the moon. That's how many documents we are processing on a yearly basis. So yeah, I think that always makes it the problem a little bit more tangible. How crazy big that volume is.

Tom Raftery: 26:25

Okay, great. Yeelen if people would like to know more about yourself or any of the things we discussed in the podcast today, where would you have me direct them?

Yeelen: 26:33

So if you wanna a little bit, know a little bit more about our services you can go to www.Klippa.com. We're in the IDP industry, so intelligent document processing. If you would like to connect with me, I would suggest LinkedIn. I'm quite active on LinkedIn, so send me a connection or an in message and happy to chat.

Tom Raftery: 26:50

Fantastic. Yeelen that's been really interesting. Thanks a million for coming on the podcast today.

Yeelen: 26:55

Thank you very much for for hosting.

Tom Raftery: 26:57

Okay. Thanks everyone for listening to this episode of the Resilient Supply Chain Podcast with me, Tom Raftery. Every week, thousands of senior supply chain and sustainability leaders tune in to learn what's next in resilience, innovation, and transformation. If your organisation wants to reach this influential global audience, the people shaping the future of supply chains, consider partnering with the show. Sponsorship isn't just brand visibility, it's thought leadership, credibility, and direct engagement with the decision makers driving change. To explore how we can spotlight your story or your solutions, connect with me on LinkedIn or drop me an email at Tom at tom Raftery dot com. Let's collaborate to build smarter, more resilient, more sustainable supply chains together. Thanks for tuning in, and I'll catch you all in the next episode.