Magnum Book Services is a global freight forwarder specialising in books. They move freight between publishers, distributors, and retailers across Australia, the UK, the US, and Asia. They don't run their own fleet. They run the end-to-end logistics from receival at export, consolidation in their own warehouses, sea and air freight through partner carriers, and final delivery into the destination market.
When freight is this specialised, generic logistics software stops being an asset. It becomes a constraint. Magnum partnered with Origin to build a system shaped around how the book trade actually moves stock. That system is now Magnum's competitive edge — lowering their cost to serve, adding visible value for their customers, and winning them new business.
Magnum's freight desk ran CargoWise for the narrow set of tasks it handles well, such as console registration, shipping line bookings, customs clearance. Everything else ran on Google Sheets. Order capture, receival, consolidation planning, customer reporting, shipment visibility. It was all manual.
It worked through the early growth phase. It stopped working as the business scaled.
Two to three full-time staff were keeping the spreadsheets current.
There was no reliable record of when shipments had moved, so disputes came down to memory. Orders landed on the wrong reports. Several of Magnum's larger clients sat behind corporate IT policies that blocked Google Sheets entirely, which meant staff worked around the problem with personal accounts.
Director of Operations, Annie Hattrell said "It was messy and it wasn't all in one place. You couldn't easily see what was on hand or plan your loads. We became desperate to fix it and have something that automates."
Customers were also pushing for a modern online portal and better visibility. What started as a portal request quickly turned into something larger.
Book logistics has its own data shape. Shipments need to be understood in relation to specific data fields relating to books. Orders sit inside publisher and retailer relationships that don't map onto general freight workflows. Reporting needs to reflect how the trade actually moves stock between markets. Drop a generic system into that, and Magnum would have ended up bending its operation to fit the software, which is the same trap they were already in.
The opportunity was the opposite: get a system shaped around the book trade and turn that fit into a commercial advantage their competitors couldn't match.
After assessing their needs, the Origin team chose to extend its existing Customer Portal product into a lightweight freight forwarding system on the Origin Platform, combining operational functionality and customer-facing visibility in one connected environment.
Building on the existing portal product framework fast-tracked delivery. The customer-facing foundation was already proven with other freight forwarders through its shipment visibility, reporting, and notification capabilities. The team then extended it with new modules for Magnum's operational workflows:
The system was configured around Magnum's unique operational requirements, so orders and shipments could be captured and understood without the manual copy-paste work that had dominated the old process. That operational data then flowed straight into the customer portal, so there was no second system, no reconciliation, no manual reporting layer.
The Magnum Portal now gives customers direct, real-time visibility of their shipments, inventory, and orders, along with self-service reporting that previously took hours to compile by hand.
Approximately 80% of the manual workload that had absorbed multiple staff is largely gone. Annie: "Our emails just disappeared overnight with all these queries just being self-service." The team that used to spend its day answering "where is my order" now spends it on work that moves the margin. "My staff can focus more on the customer service side than just doing data entry. They are able to focus more on actual loads, making more profit out of loads."
Customers got real-time visibility, automated reporting, and self-service control over data they previously had to request. The "where is my order" conversation became a dashboard. Now, many of their smaller customers are adopting the system as a core operating system to manage their own business.
The system carries the process, so new hires came up to speed from documentation alone. "I hired two new staff and I didn't need to teach them. The SOPs I created were enough."
Magnum won back a US freight contract from a competitor on the strength of the portal alone. The client saw what the system did and switched the business back. Visibility, in that procurement, was the deciding factor.
As Nikhil Prasad, Origin Solution Manager, put it: "It's quite a unique project because it delivers operational functionality and customer experience at the same time, providing massive gains for both Magnum and their customers."
Magnum's roadmap takes the same platform across their UK and US operations, with the goal of bringing three regional operating systems onto one. From there, more automation through direct customer integration will further improve their efficiencies.
Magnum started this project looking for a customer portal. They ended up with the platform their global business now runs on, and the competitive edge that comes with it.
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