“You just have to try it. We’re a small company, but nothing ventured, nothing gained — so we just went for it.” — Patrick Beukhof, B&M Transport Service
About the company
B&M Transport Service started with one small delivery van, a favor, and a healthy dose of Dutch stubbornness. The company was founded in the mid-90s by Patrick’s parents, with his mother driving small local routes out of Ede — and grew, vehicle by vehicle, into a driveway full of company vans, until they finally moved to a purpose-built site in 2002.
Thirty years on, B&M has grown to around 50 employees and a fleet of some 40 vehicles, but the company has stayed exactly what it always wanted to be: a genuine family business. Patrick’s uncle and cousin also work there, alongside him and his twin brother Remco.
“It’s a company where you don’t have too many people — you know everyone by name, and you’re never just a number,” says Patrick.
B&M doesn’t specialize in a single niche. Instead, the company takes on almost anything that requires a bit of extra care: pharmaceutical and medical transport, construction logistics with or without a crane truck, catering and hospitality deliveries, temperature-controlled transport, and general transport — from a single box to a full truckload of pallets. B&M also runs a warehouse for pallet storage and handles inbound and outbound logistics for customers who need it, acting as an intermediary for international transport when required.
That versatility, combined with a personal approach, is what sets B&M apart. Customers keep dealing with the same faces and the same Dutch-speaking drivers — and B&M takes pride in actively helping customers work smarter, rather than just moving their freight. For one large customer, B&M noticed that internal miscommunication was causing duplicate bookings that could easily be merged into a single order — so the team flagged it and helped improve the process, saving the customer money and strengthening the relationship.
How they found Qargo
Patrick discovered Qargo almost by accident, at the IT & Logistiek trade fair in Utrecht. B&M had already visited several larger, established TMS providers that day — and hadn’t been convinced.
“It all felt dated,” Patrick recalls. “One of the bigger vendors ran two separate systems that had to talk to each other, which didn’t seem very practical. Everything looked like it was from around 2010. It just wasn’t flexible enough for us — we offer so many different services that we need a system we can easily adapt.”
B&M had walked past Qargo’s booth earlier that day and had nearly left without coming back. With about an hour left before the fair closed, they decided to take a look after all.
“We had a conversation with someone there, got a short preview, and we were genuinely excited. It looked modern, easy to adapt, and clear.” Ruben reached out shortly after to go over everything in more detail.
The challenge
Before Qargo, B&M worked with Excel for planning and handwritten trip reports — while invoicing ran through an entirely separate system.
“It was very labor-intensive, error-prone, and not flexible at all,” says Patrick. Trip information wasn’t always where drivers needed it: they were often simply handed a printout of the customer’s original email and expected to find the right details themselves, which meant things occasionally got missed. Looking up a past trip meant digging through Excel files and paper folders — time-consuming, and not something you wanted to do more often than necessary.
The trigger for change wasn’t a crisis — it was a generational shift. When Patrick and his twin brother Remco joined the company full-time, they brought a different, fresh perspective on the processes. “The older generation — my parents and the rest of the planning team — didn’t necessarily see the need to change; it had always worked that way. But we had the time, and a bit more of a feel for IT, so we started looking at what else was possible.”
Looking back at the old process, Patrick estimates that planning a single trip — from order to a usable trip report for the driver — now takes roughly half the time it used to.
The solution
Since going live, B&M has completely overhauled the way orders, planning, and invoicing flow through the company.
Planning a trip used to mean writing stops on a paper road map, copying them by hand onto a list, matching license plates, and finally logging everything in what the team fondly called “the big Sinterklaas book” — the central trip log. Now it’s: select the stop, click, link, done — and it’s saved in the system immediately.
Invoicing has undergone a similar transformation. Where the team used to work with a shared Excel file (with the occasional sync error), print and scan invoices just to get the company logo on them, and send each invoice out individually, invoices are now created directly in Qargo, branded, and sent — often in a single bulk action. “That used to take our admin team a lot of time, sending every invoice separately. Now it’s just one bulk action,” says Patrick.
Toll costs, previously calculated manually in a separate tool, are now calculated automatically as soon as the route is entered — one less manual step, and one less place for errors to creep in.
B&M has also started using Qargo Intelligence, in particular AI-driven order entry: dragging a customer email straight into Qargo and letting the system pre-fill the order. The team also uses Qargo’s AI chat for day-to-day product questions. “It’s especially good for things that are already documented — how do I do this, how do I do that. If it’s a bug or something less standard, it recognizes that pretty quickly and you get connected to a real person fast,” says Patrick.
One feature was built specifically around B&M’s own way of working: a “flexible planning order.” Some of B&M’s jobs — like picking up equipment for a hospital — don’t have a fixed delivery date, only a time window (say, a week) within which it needs to happen. Qargo added the ability to set a “load before” or “unload before” date instead of a fixed date, so B&M can filter for orders that need to happen on a specific day versus orders that can happen any day within that week. “That’s something we needed for how we work, and it really helps us now,” says Patrick.
B&M has also started adding vehicle and driver costs to individual trips, making it possible to see — tolls included — whether a specific trip is actually profitable, or whether a different vehicle or a price adjustment is needed. And with more and more customers asking for emissions data per trip (some construction customers need it for sustainability certification), Qargo’s per-trip emissions data has replaced a calculation B&M previously couldn’t easily do at all. “If we didn’t have Qargo, we’d honestly just have to guess,” says Patrick.
Integrations
B&M currently integrates Qargo with:
- Samsara (telematics), with plans to expand into Qargo’s driver app (mobile app) and possibly driver time registration
- Snelstart (accounting), with invoices automatically forwarded to their accountant
- Email/mailbox integration, with customer orders landing directly in Qargo
Patrick highlights the breadth of Qargo’s API capabilities as a real differentiator: “Other TMS systems we looked at could only connect with a handful of other systems. With Qargo, there was almost nothing we couldn’t connect to.”
The onboarding experience
B&M started in a sandbox environment, running it alongside their existing Excel-based process — not always the easiest thing to juggle, but a deliberate, low-risk way to start.
Ruben gave a thorough kickoff presentation and helped set up the resources B&M needed, after which onboarding specialist Michiel spent two to three days on site. “He was good company, but he also asked the right questions, and whenever we raised something, he picked up on it quickly,” says Patrick. Within a few weeks the team had fully switched over, with only minor teething problems — all of which are now resolved.
Adoption needed a small push at first. “In the beginning they needed some encouragement to use the sandbox,” Patrick admits, “but eventually they enjoyed it — trying things out, seeing what happened on screen.” Ongoing support now runs through Qargo’s in-app chat and the team’s account manager, alongside the direct line the team had with Michiel during onboarding.
The results
✅ Planning time roughly cut in half, from order entry to a driver-ready trip report
✅ Invoicing simplified: from manual Excel entry, printing, scanning, and sending individually, to branded invoices sent in bulk directly from Qargo
✅ Toll costs calculated automatically, removing a manual step and a source of errors
✅ Faster, more reliable trip lookups: past trips can be found in seconds instead of digging through paper and spreadsheets
✅ Visibility into profitability and emissions per trip, supporting pricing decisions and customer sustainability questions
✅ AI-driven order entry that reduces manual data entry on incoming orders
“Now it’s just select, click, link, and it’s done — and it’s saved in the system right away,” says Patrick. “As a company, we save time, money, and quite a bit of paper too.”
Why this matters
B&M’s story is a familiar one in the transport industry: a company that grew up on paper, spreadsheets, and institutional memory, and reached the point where that approach simply couldn’t scale further — not because anything broke, but because a newer generation within the company saw a better way of working.
For businesses juggling multiple types of transport, or customers with increasingly specific requirements (fixed versus flexible delivery windows, per-trip emissions data, per-job profitability), flexibility isn’t a luxury — it’s what allows a company to keep saying “yes” to different kinds of work without drowning in admin.
What’s next
B&M is currently exploring more intensive use of Qargo’s driver app (mobile app) — something they waited on until it could offer the flexibility their drivers need, such as adjusting the number of pallets on the go. Longer term, the team is also looking at using Samsara for driver time registration, along with broader integration.
“One of the real advantages of Qargo is that you don’t have to stitch together a bunch of different systems that don’t communicate well with each other. Most of what we need is just there,” says Patrick.
In closing
Asked what he’d tell another operator considering Qargo, Patrick doesn’t hesitate: “Just ask for a demo. Your first impression matters — and for us it clicked pretty much right away, because it matched how we actually work, from order to invoicing.”
“Every company is different, but Qargo is flexible enough to have that conversation — to sit down together and look at what’s possible. That’s the main tip: talk it through, and see what’s possible.”
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