The Problem
The company is a family-owned manufacturer and leader in visual communication and display solutions since 1976, based in Lebanon, Ohio. The company designs and manufactures whiteboards, glassboards, bulletin boards, display cases, and space division furniture for education, healthcare, office, and government sectors — with annual revenue of approximately $45M and over 95% of products made in the USA. Its single manufacturing facility ships approximately 15,000 shipments annually across North America, primarily via LTL carriers with smaller volumes through truckload and parcel modes. A company of this size and focus should not need a complex freight audit infrastructure. But the one it had was both fragmented and expensive.
The rate management problem was the most tangible cost: $3,500 per month — $42,000 per year — on FreightView as an external rating engine purely to quote shipments. FreightView had no audit capability. It sat alongside Microsoft Dynamics NAV as the TMS, alongside the manual audit process, as a third system requiring its own maintenance, its own data management, and its own subscription cost. The data lived in three places: NAV held shipment history, FreightView held rate data, and the manual audit process operated outside both. When an invoice arrived, reconciling it against the contracted rate required accessing systems that did not share data.
Discrepancy management was reactive. Without proactive cost monitoring, billing errors and accessorial overcharges across the 7-to-10 LTL carrier network were discovered only when they were large enough to notice informally — not through a systematic validation process. Credits were pursued manually and slowly. Carrier performance had no systematic tracking: on-time delivery rates, service level compliance, and billing accuracy existed only as informal impressions, not as data the operations team could use to make carrier selection decisions or negotiate renewals with leverage.
What Freehand Did
Freehand deployed AI-powered freight audit with a four-way match — invoice against contracted rate, against proof of delivery, against purchase order, and against shipment actuals — replacing the manual verification that had relied on NAV data and FreightView rate lookups. The Rate Manager Agent replaced FreightView entirely: intelligent rate optimization across all LTL and parcel carriers, integrated directly into the audit workflow rather than living in a separate subscription. The $42,000 annual FreightView subscription is gone. The rate management capability is better.
The Audit Agent’s AI-driven anomaly detection identifies billing discrepancies in real time — the reactive discrepancy management that had allowed billing errors to accumulate until someone noticed them is replaced by continuous monitoring that flags overcharges, accessorial mismatches, and service level non-compliance before payment is approved. Exception detection that previously required manual attention now routes automatically to the carrier through the Collaboration Agent, with structured evidence packets assembled and dispute timelines tracked. The 75% reduction in audit cycle time is the combined output of automated four-way matching replacing manual invoice review and AI-powered exception routing replacing email-based carrier communication.
The Spend Intelligence Agent delivers comprehensive carrier performance insights — on-time delivery rates, billing accuracy, dispute resolution speed, and service level compliance across the full LTL carrier network. The informal impressions the operations team had used for carrier selection decisions are replaced by data the team can act on. Carrier renewals are negotiated with documented billing history and performance evidence rather than with relationships alone. The NAV integration provides unified data workflows and real-time freight spend visibility — the siloed data model that had prevented meaningful analysis is replaced by a connected view from invoice through payment through carrier performance. $300,000-plus in three-year net benefit from a single manufacturing facility, 15,000 annual shipments, and a team that no longer pays for a rating engine it should never have needed separately.
