Stokker is the leading professional tools and machinery company in the Baltics and Finland, employing around 700 people across more than 30 tool centres. The company serves a wide range of industries, from metalworking and construction to agriculture and car servicing, representing premium brands such as Milwaukee, JCB, Valvoline and Kubota. With both retail stores and a growing e-commerce operation, Stokker ships 10,000 to 15,000 parcels per month from its central warehouse in Estonia to customers across the Baltics.
When the company migrated its ERP from Axapta to Microsoft Dynamics Finance & Operations, the supply chain team saw an opportunity to rethink how they connected with transport partners. Rather than rebuilding individual carrier integrations inside the new ERP, they connected Dynamics F&O to Cargoson once, and reached all their carriers through it.
Why Stokker stopped integrating carriers into their ERP one by one
Before Cargoson, every transport partner had to be individually integrated into the ERP. Adding a new carrier meant development work and took time. Taivo Karu, Head of Supply Chain and Board Member at Stokker, explains the shift in thinking.
"We didn't want to initiate the integrations with all the different transport providers. Our goal was to use a single point of centre, which is Cargoson. That fully helps us to move faster and actually provide value for our customers, because we don't have to spend money on linking all the transport partners."
- Taivo Karu, Head of Supply Chain and Board Member at Stokker
New carrier live in five minutes
This means Stokker can select carriers based on what their customers actually need, not based on which integrations happen to be in place. If a carrier is available in Cargoson, Stokker can start working with them almost immediately. If not, Cargoson builds the integration at no cost to Stokker or the carrier within a couple of weeks.
"If you open your transport company and you are available in Cargoson, we can start working with you in five minutes. That enables us to be in line with the customer's needs. We don't have to think about how complicated it is to connect with carriers or how different their data structure might be. It's just a five-minute setup."
- Taivo Karu, Head of Supply Chain and Board Member at Stokker
From web shop to warehouse without a logistics team in between
For outbound shipments, Stokker has built a fully automated flow. When a customer places an order on the Stokker web shop, whether in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania or Finland, the order goes directly to the warehouse. A picker collects the items, a packer prepares the parcel and closes the order. At that point, the shipment is automatically created in Microsoft Dynamics, and Cargoson generates the carrier label.
"The order comes in automatically, the shipment is created in Dynamics, and we get the label from Cargoson. Nobody in logistics needs to touch it," explains Karu.
The end customer chooses their preferred carrier at checkout. Whether it is a parcel locker provider or a courier service, the order flows through the same system. Cargoson acts as the bridge between Stokker's ERP (Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations) and whichever carrier the customer has selected.
15,000 shipments a month handled by 2 people
At Stokker's volumes, manual logistics processes would be impractical. The company now manages its entire transport operation with what amounts to around two full-time employees in their logistics department: one logistics coordinator handling all incoming shipments, and one terminal manager overseeing loadings, the terminal team, and packing.
"Imagine if you have 15,000 shipments per month, that's somewhere around 500 to 1,000 shipments per day. And you would need to do it in different portals and the stickers would be coming out in different formats. It would be impossible."
Karu draws a parallel with the taxi industry.
"I think the impact of Cargoson can be compared to the impact of Uber and Bolt in the taxi industry. If you think of yourself as the person in the office, answering calls and dispatching taxis, on a small scale, you could do it. On a wider scale, it would be impossible to handle everything."
- Taivo Karu, Head of Supply Chain and Board Member at Stokker
All carriers, all shipments, one place to track everything
Beyond shipment creation, having all carriers in one multi-carrier platform has simplified day-to-day tracking for the entire organisation. The purchasing team uses Cargoson to follow incoming goods, checking whether a shipment has been picked up, whether it is in transit, when it will arrive, and what the transport cost was, since that feeds into the final cost of each product.
"Our people don't have to know which portal to log into to track a specific code. We can just find the shipment in Cargoson based on our own indexes, and then we can also answer the customer's question of where their shipment is," Karu explains.
Choosing carriers based on demand, not technical limitations
For a company of Stokker's size, carrier relationships are managed through annual transport tenders rather than per-shipment bidding. The primary carrier handles 50–60% of volume, with two or three secondary partners covering the rest. Cargoson's consulting team helps Stokker analyse tender data and summarise carrier offers.
But the strategic value goes beyond price comparison. Because adding a carrier through Cargoson takes minutes rather than weeks of ERP development, Stokker can respond quickly when customers demand a specific delivery option.
"We can add carriers based on what our customers need, not based on what's integrated into our system."
What comes next: transport data in BI
Stokker is planning to connect Cargoson's data to their business intelligence system, bringing transport data alongside the rest of their operational analytics. Karu sees this as the next step in making data-driven decisions about logistics.
"The most important thing is that all carrier data is structured the same way. Without Cargoson, we would need to import data from each carrier separately and try to bring it all into one database ourselves," he notes.
One ERP connection, all carriers, two people
Instead of rebuilding carrier integrations one by one in a new ERP, Stokker connected Microsoft Dynamics to Cargoson once. That single decision changed everything. New carriers go live in five minutes instead of weeks. Orders flow from the web shop to a carrier label without anyone in logistics touching them. 15,000 monthly shipments run with two people. And the supply chain team spends its time on carrier strategy and customer needs, not on managing integrations.
As Karu puts it: "For the wider organisation, our goal is to move faster, more efficiently, and always with the customer in mind. Automation is a big part of that."
Stokker is one of 500+ companies managing multi-carrier freight through Cargoson. Want to see how it works with your carriers and ERP?
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