The Problem
The pandemic hit Accuride like a perfect storm. With the Suez Canal blockage turning global logistics into a nightmare, freight rates multiplied tenfold. Driver and container shortages compounded an already fragmented operational structure where freight forwarders, carriers, customs house agents, and the Accuride team all worked in complete isolation — each trapped in its own silo of systems and processes. The company had 14-plus manufacturing facilities across North America, Europe, and Asia, and 1,000-plus global multi-tier suppliers — and no unified visibility across any of it.
The most visceral symptom: 100 containers sitting at a port, quietly accumulating massive detention and demurrage charges, with no one at Accuride aware they were even there. Every day those containers sat, costs mounted. Carrier and port authorities were charging across 72 different accessorial charge types. The procurement team was working blind — manual spreadsheets, no market intelligence, no carrier performance benchmarking, tendering based on pre-defined rules that reflected last year's market, not today's. Documentation was the operational bottleneck: everything ran through endless email chains, paperwork went missing, versions proliferated, and critical shipping documents for freight forwarders and customs brokers arrived late or not at all — holding up port clearance and driving up dwell time at entry points.
Invoice reconciliation had no systematic controls. With 72 different accessorial charge types arriving on carrier invoices and no 4-way match capability, the team had no reliable way to determine whether each charge was contractually entitled. Disputes were handled manually and resolved slowly. The combination of invisible containers, unvalidated invoices, and fragmented carrier communication was not just operationally painful — it was financially unsustainable at the scale of a $1B-plus global manufacturer.
What Freehand Did
Freehand deployed an AI platform covering ocean freight visibility, document management, carrier collaboration, rate management, and invoice audit — addressing all three core problems simultaneously. The Collaboration Agent connected all ecosystem partners — carriers, freight forwarders, customs house agents, and the Accuride team — in a single collaborative environment with automated alerts for shipment creation, milestone events, and document requirements. The 100-container port dwell problem was resolved structurally: automated alerts now notify vendors and drayage providers when containers are inbound, eliminating the information gap that had let containers accumulate detention charges invisibly.
Document management moved from email chains to a digital workflow with built-in compliance checks. Smart workflows automatically trigger document requirements, track completion status, validate accuracy and completeness, and enable real-time sharing across partners. When documents are correct and complete before the shipment arrives at port, parts flow through the port of entry faster — the precise outcome Accuride needed to reduce detention and demurrage at scale across 3,000-plus global annual shipments.
The Rate Manager Agent digitized carrier contracts and rate cards with carrier performance benchmarking integration. The AI Procurement Analyst replaced manual tendering with intelligent events — configurable lane and lot structures, reverse auction capability, counter-offer suggestions, and bid optimization across cost and service-level parameters. Rate management moved from static manual spreadsheets to a live repository with exception alerts when rate validity expires or market conditions deviate significantly from contracted terms.
The Audit Agent's 4-way invoice matching — contract, proof of delivery, purchase order, and shipment milestone data — gave Accuride, for the first time, the ability to verify exactly what was billed against exactly what was entitled. The result: accessorial charges reduced from 72 charge types down to 7 essential ones, with $500 per container in savings from that reduction alone. Disputes are resolved in real time within the platform. The $1.5M in total freight savings is the compounded output of all five capabilities operating as a single closed-loop system.
