The Problem
The company manages a complex hardware supply chain supporting data centers, VR/AR devices and enterprise infrastructure across global warehouses in the US, China, Japan, Australia, Netherlands, and UK. Its freight audit ran through CTSI Global — an outsourced FAP vendor performing manual 2-way matching between rate cards and freight invoices with no integration into Oracle Transportation Management for shipment data validation. The blind spot was structural: CTSI could confirm that an invoice matched a rate card, but could not confirm whether the rate card applied to the actual shipment, whether the accessorial was entitled, or whether the carrier had billed the same invoice twice.
The process mechanics compounded the problem. CTSI manually consolidated invoices in Excel every 10 days before sending payment requests. The 10-day batch cycle meant carriers waited up to two weeks for payment on clean invoices — creating friction, higher rates to compensate for cash flow uncertainty, and no audit trail that the finance team could query independently. OTM managed shipment data on one side. Oracle ERP managed financial data on another. CTSI Global managed the invoices in a third system. No integration existed between them. Finance teams couldn’t access shipment details; logistics couldn’t see GL impacts.
The GL allocation problem was particularly acute. The company's multi-dimensional GL structure — company code, cost center, account, product, project, intercompany — required manual intervention for every invoice. No automated logic existed to allocate freight costs by inbound versus outbound flows, by data center versus consumer hardware, or by the 7 global warehouse locations the company operated. Every invoice required a human to look up the correct GL combination and assign it manually.
What Freehand Did
Freehand replaced CTSI Global with a 3-way matching architecture that connects Oracle OTM shipment data, contracted rate cards, and carrier invoices into a single validation engine. The OTM integration was rebuilt at the data layer: Freehand connects directly to OTM for shipment records and rate structures, eliminating the manual bridging that had required CTSI to consolidate data in Excel every 10 days. The 90% reduction in invoice processing time is the direct output of replacing the 10-day manual batch cycle with same-day automated validation — carriers now receive payment in 2–3 days on clean invoices, versus the 10-plus days of the CTSI model.
The GL Coding Agent automated the manual allocation process across their multi-dimensional GL structure. Shipment characteristics — inbound vs. outbound, data center vs. consumer hardware, warehouse location, intercompany vs. external — now trigger the correct GL combination automatically, with business rules configured to handle the edge cases that previously required human judgment. The GL allocation that consumed manual effort on every invoice now runs without intervention. Cost center, account, product, and project codes are assigned correctly, consistently, and immediately.
Unified spend visibility covers all 7 global warehouse locations — US, China, Japan, Australia, Netherlands, and UK — in a single platform with real-time dashboards. Finance teams can see freight spend by location, mode, carrier, and cost center without requesting data from CTSI or building it manually from OTM exports. The 75% faster payment cycle to carriers improved carrier relationships materially — and eliminated the rate premium carriers had built in to compensate for CTSI’s extended payment timelines. The FAP scope evolved into a 5-category platform — adding Procurement, Trade Compliance, Warehousing FAP, and Managed Services on top of the audit foundation that replaced CTSI.
