Calculating Shipment-Level Emissions Across a Complex Groupage Network

Challenge: A Groupage Network Built on Hundreds of Partners

Andreas Schmid Group is a family-owned logistics service provider headquartered near Augsburg, and has been in family ownership for three generations. Alongside air and sea freight, customs clearance, road transports and contract logistics, its core business runs through groupage (part-load) networks, where most of its shipment volume moves.

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In that network, a single truck rarely carries one full load. It is loaded with dozens of individual shipments – some of them very small, including furniture and other goods delivered directly to private households. To move these shipments from pickup to final delivery, Andreas Schmid works with a large number of partner carriers, inside and outside its own network. Day to day, that is not a problem: what matters is that a shipment arrives, not which vehicle carried which leg of the journey.

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For emissions reporting, it became one. One of Andreas Schmid's several transport networks already calculated emissions collectively for shipments moving within it, but that left the rest of the business uncovered. Elsewhere, the company had, in places, produced simple manual estimates on request – workable at low volume, but not something that could scale to around 1.5 million shipments a year. As customer requests grew, driven in part by the CSRD, customers also began asking more pointed questions about the methodology behind Andreas Schmid's numbers, and about whether they could be trusted for the customers' own CO₂ balance sheets.

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“We work with a lot of different partners, and because of that, it can be complex to fully trace how a transport actually ran.”

Mira Rische, ESG Specialist, Andreas Schmid Group

Solution: Calculating the Full Chain, and Closing the Gaps

The push to calculate emissions in the first place traced back to something else Andreas Schmid wanted to offer: Book & Claim. Doing that required a reliable way to calculate the underlying emissions, and building that in-house was considered and dropped – the compliance requirements looked costly and uncertain to develop internally, while solutions like shipzero were already available.

After comparing several platforms and checking references with partners already using different systems, Andreas Schmid chose shipzero: it was the only platform under consideration that offered Book & Claim alongside emissions calculation, with a ready-to-use reporting dashboard rather than requiring Andreas Schmid to build its own way of packaging and sending reports to customers.

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Andreas Schmid connected its transport management system to shipzero by API from day one, without an Excel-based phase in between. To get started, the company closely followed the ISO 14083 and GLEC Framework–aligned methodology already in use by another shipzero customer in its network – a shortcut that spared Andreas Schmid from having to define precision requirements from scratch.

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A large part of the actual work went into correctly modelling Andreas Schmid's transport chains. A shipment from Andreas Schmid's home base near Augsburg to Hamburg, for instance, is not driven end-to-end by one of the company's own trucks: it is picked up locally, brought to a terminal, driven partway by Andreas Schmid, handed to a partner carrier at a midpoint, and driven and delivered from there. Because Andreas Schmid's own data does not explicitly record where a shipment passed through a terminal, shipzero applies assumption-based rules tied to each process step to allocate handling emissions correctly – a point that took real back-and-forth between the two teams to get right, since it is central to the calculation but invisible in the raw data.

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The bigger issue surfaced during final review, ahead of go-live. Handing a shipment to a partner carrier for part of its journey means Andreas Schmid does not always receive complete data back for that leg. That is a structural feature of working through so many external partners, not a problem unique to Andreas Schmid. As part of its own thorough review before launch, Andreas Schmid's team traced through the data and found that many shipments were missing a leg entirely – recorded, for example, as leaving Gersthofen for Munich and then reappearing later in Hannover, with no trace of what happened in between. Since this information was not previously relevant to the operational business, there was no need to systematically capture and maintain it. Together, the two teams built a rule into the platform to catch this automatically going forward: whenever a shipment's expected process steps do not match its recorded addresses, shipzero flags the mismatch and models the missing leg using the shortest feasible distance, so the shipment can still be calculated as one connected chain.

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Andreas Schmid had originally hoped to be live by the end of the first quarter of 2026. Because this gap only became fully clear close to final testing, the project took around twice as long as planned, going live in June instead.

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“Being able to handle these data gaps automatically is what made this workable for us. Otherwise, we would have been left with a lot of incomplete shipments to sort through manually.”

Mira Rische, ESG Specialist, Andreas Schmid Group

Results: Self-Service Reporting, and the Delivery of a Missing Piece

Around 15 people across Andreas Schmid's sales and commercial teams now have direct, self-service access to shipzero. Following a walkthrough session by shipzero, they can filter for a given customer and download the relevant report themselves – useful, since Andreas Schmid's sales colleagues often know best which of the company's many subsidiaries and accounts a request actually belongs to. That access is already being used to respond to tenders as well as one-off customer requests, without Mira needing to be in the loop for everyone.

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For Mira personally, it closed a longer-standing gap. As the person responsible for Andreas Schmid's own sustainability reporting and corporate carbon accounting, she could already calculate Scope 1 emissions precisely, from measured diesel consumption across the company's own fleet. Scope 3 emissions from subcontracted transport were a different story: Andreas Schmid records shipment weight but not distance, and without distance there was no way to calculate tonne-kilometres, and therefore no way to calculate that share of Scope 3, at all. shipzero closed that gap. She now draws on the same data both to answer customer requests and to feed her own emissions reporting.

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That reporting is about to become more formal. Andreas Schmid published its first voluntary sustainability report in 2026, without Scope 3 transport emissions included. From 2027 onwards, calculating those emissions via shipzero is one of the company's stated environmental objectives for its Eco-Management and Audit Scheme (EMAS) certification, and Andreas Schmid plans to fold its EMAS environmental statement into the same sustainability report going forward.

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Sustainability credentials are increasingly part of how Andreas Schmid competes for larger accounts – the company recently completed an EcoVadis assessment relevant to a major tender, for example – and being able to back up customer conversations with granular, shipment-level emissions data adds to that case. Mira notes that customer demand for this kind of data has fluctuated in 2025 with the broader economic climate and with regulatory simplification under the EU's Omnibus package, though she expects it to pick back up, particularly as large customers set their own targets under the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi), which require Scope 3 data from their logistics providers.

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“With shipzero, one calculation now covers both needs. I can use the same data for customer requests and for my own sustainability reporting, at the same time.”

Mira Rische, ESG Specialist, Andreas Schmid Group

Outlook: Book & Claim, Electric Trucks, and What Is Still Ahead

Looking back at the roughly six months the project took, Mira's main takeaway is more about process than technology. Given the chance to do it again, she says she would review the underlying transport data more closely, and earlier, to catch structural gaps like the missing-leg issue before they surface late in the project. At the same time, she does not see the extra time it took as a real setback: what mattered was arriving at a result the business could rely on.

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Book & Claim was part of why Andreas Schmid looked at shipzero in the first place, but the company has since pushed the actual rollout back to 2027 rather than treating it as an immediate next step.

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Andreas Schmid has just put its first electric trucks into operation, and Mira sees a natural connection to Book & Claim as that fleet grows – whether that ends up running through Book & Claim or through Andreas Schmid's standard emissions reports is still an open question the company plans to work through with shipzero.

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Beyond Book & Claim, the clearest next step is scope. Today's setup covers the roughly 1.5 million shipments a year that run through Andreas Schmid's main transport management system. The company's international subsidiaries run different systems, as does its smaller air and sea freight division, and bringing either into the same reporting would mean rebuilding the same assumption-based rules from scratch for each one – a real option, not yet scheduled.

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“Book & Claim is exactly why we brought shipzero on board in the first place. Our fleet is already moving toward electric, and once it does, offering that data to specific customers through Book & Claim is a natural next step for us.”

Mira Rische, ESG Specialist, Andreas Schmid Group

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Learn more about how shipzero's Data Ingestion, Client & Audit Reporting, and Partner & Carrier Integration solutions work for logistics service providers.