The Problem
The company’s inbound domestic freight had run through C.H. Robinson via Navisphere for years. Vendors logged into CHR to schedule shipments to the two distribution centers. CHR selected carriers, managed lanes, and set routing rules. It worked — in the sense that shipments moved. What it did not produce was any logistics capability the company owned. No independent carrier contracts. No visibility into lane-level costs. No ability to model consolidation opportunities across 400-plus inbound suppliers. No data to negotiate with at the next rate cycle. The broker managed the complexity. The company paid for the result without being able to verify whether it was a good one.
The market rate problem was the sharpest edge. When market conditions shifted, the company had no mechanism to know whether CHR’s routing decisions were still cost-optimal, no benchmark to compare against, and no carrier relationships to activate independently. The company did not know what its lanes should cost because it had never needed to know — CHR knew, and CHR set the terms. That dependency was not a choice made deliberately. It was the accumulated result of a decade of outsourcing logistics decisions to a broker that had no incentive to help the company build its own capability.
International imports had recently moved from CHR to JAS for freight forwarding. But appointment scheduling for import containers arriving at the DCs was still manual — calls, emails, shared portals. Detention charges accumulated when container arrivals were not anticipated far enough in advance, particularly during the peak spring and summer boating season when dock scheduling was most constrained. There was no systematic mechanism to flag arrival timing before detention charges accrued. The company was absorbing costs it had no visibility into and no process to prevent.
The evaluation requirement was straightforward: establish independent carrier contracts across the 400-plus supplier inbound network, bring lane pricing and routing intelligence in-house, and build the procurement capability to renegotiate rates on the company’s own terms — not on a cadence and at a price CHR set. Freehand’s remit was procurement, rate management, and the spend intelligence to make both defensible.
What Freehand Did
Freehand deployed its AI Procurement and Rate Management platform across the inbound network — establishing, for the first time, direct carrier contracts between the company and 25 carriers covering domestic TL, LTL, and the import coordination lanes previously brokered entirely through CHR. The Rate Manager Agent digitized those contracts into a live repository with versioning and effective-date logic. When rates change, the update happens in one place and applies automatically to every carrier evaluation, every shipment routing decision, and every cost validation that follows. The company now knows what it contracted and can verify what it was charged — a capability it had never had under the broker model.
The AI Procurement Analyst runs sourcing events on the company’s terms. Lane construction and lot aggregation draw from the company’s own supplier and volume data, not from a broker’s system the company cannot access. Carrier bids are normalized, ranked by cost and service-level criteria, and modeled in scenario form — lowest cost, incumbent retention, seasonal capacity weighting — with the output available to the procurement team before any award decision. Counter-offer and bid extension logic is configurable per event. The procurement cycle that ran on CHR’s schedule and CHR’s data now runs on the company’s schedule and the company’s data.
Consolidation opportunities across the 400-plus supplier network are now visible and actionable. The AI Procurement Analyst identifies where LTL shipments can consolidate to TL, where import container timing can be coordinated to reduce drayage costs, and where supplier routing instructions can be updated to avoid peak-detention exposure at the DCs. The Collaboration Agent manages container arrival scheduling with JAS, flagging free-day windows before detention charges accrue and giving DC teams advance visibility to inbound load timing. The reactive detention management that had accumulated costs invisibly now operates as a proactive scheduling function.
The Spend Intelligence Agent provides the visibility the broker relationship had structurally prevented. Lane-level freight cost — what the company is paying, to which carrier, on which route, relative to the market benchmark — is available in real time. When a carrier’s rate drifts above the contracted schedule, the Rate Manager Agent flags it before the next invoice cycle. When market conditions move, the AI Procurement Analyst identifies which lanes warrant re-bidding without waiting for an annual cycle. The company that spent a decade outsourcing its logistics intelligence to a broker now owns that intelligence. The broker’s value proposition was complexity management. Freehand’s AI Teams manage the same complexity — and give the company the data it never had access to before.
