The thesis is about process improvement with a focus on measuring deviation in the maritime transport documentation process. The commissioning company was UPM Sales Oy. The implementation of this thesis was conducted with the Business Processes and Solutions team and in close cooperation with the UPM Paper ENA OverSeas Customer Service department located in Tampere. Process development was carried out recently and deviations had not been recorded earlier. Due to this the subject is seen as important. The main objectives of this thesis included exploring and describing the maritime transport documentation process, measuring deviations occurring in this process, explaining creation mechanisms of the deviations, estimating the magnitude of the problems that the deviations created, and finally introducing further steps for improvement.

Literature on international trade, international logistics, and finally quality improvement and related methods were reviewed for this thesis. Theories were applied to collect, measure and analyze data based on this literature review. Flow diagram was created to identify the potentially critical and problematic areas in the process examined. The main data collection of errors occurring in the process was conducted with survey research strategy with longitudinal time horizon. A pre-structured data collection form was filled in by the personnel working in the OverSeas Customer Service department.

Transferring information between different parties and systems has a significant influence on the error generation mechanism. The new process of handling instructions reduces manual data transfers needed during the process. The number of errors initiated by an internal party should therefore be reduced. Most errors were initiated by carriers. Cooperation is needed with carriers to further improve the performance of the process. Most of the errors were detected as early as possible after the initiation point and only a few errors travelled through the multiple possible detection points prior to being caught.