The Problem
The company manufactures fire suppression and life safety systems — equipment where product quality and delivery reliability are not just operational goals, they are regulatory and safety obligations. Its logistics operation, however, ran without a TMS, without systematic freight intelligence, and without the operational visibility the company needed to confidently plan downstream delivery commitments. A lean logistics team managed the full network across the US, Mexico, and Canada using manual processes, email-based carrier coordination, and spreadsheet rate management. When team members were promoted, transitioned, or replaced — which happened frequently — institutional knowledge walked out with them. There was no system to hold the process.
Freight procurement ran on pre-defined rules rather than market intelligence. Without access to carrier performance benchmarking or live rate data, tender decisions were based on historical relationships and routing guides that may have been cost-optimal when they were built but drifted from market rates over time with no mechanism to detect the gap. When logistics volatility hit — container shortages, canal disruptions, 3PL bankruptcies — the team had no data layer to identify alternative routing options or model cost impact quickly. The Suez and Panama Canal crises that had upended supply chains across the industry were exactly the kind of events the company’s current setup was least equipped to handle.
The invoice audit process was equally manual. Freight invoices arrived from carriers across multiple modes without a systematic matching process. Accessorial charges were reviewed informally rather than validated against contracted entitlements. Billing errors accumulated without detection. The team managing exceptions was also the team managing day-to-day carrier relationships, procurement, and visibility — a compression of responsibilities that made strategic improvement work impossible. The logistics director framed the ask clearly: not a feature list, but an outcome — do more with a lean team, make the process systematic rather than person-dependent, and produce real freight savings.
The evaluation process included direct reference calls with Accuride’s SVP of Global Supply Chain and Director of Distribution — both operating in a similar Plex ERP environment and both willing to speak candidly about implementation experience and outcomes. The Accuride results — $1.5M saved, 72 accessorial charges reduced to 7 — provided the proof of concept the company’s team needed to commit to a full deployment.
What Freehand Did
Freehand deployed across the full North American network — US, Mexico, and Canada — covering both outbound shipments to customers and inbound from suppliers. The AI Procurement Analyst replaced the pre-defined routing guide logic with AI-driven carrier selection based on live performance data, market rate benchmarks, and configurable lane and lot structures. The rate management model that had been running on static spreadsheets updated intermittently now runs on the Rate Manager Agent — a live rate repository with carrier performance scoring, accessorial validation rules, and exception alerts when contracted rates expire or market conditions move significantly.
The Invoice Ingestion Agent handles all carrier invoice formats across modes without EDI setup for initial carriers. Invoices arrive via email, are extracted and normalized, and pass through the Audit Agent’s multi-way match before any payment is approved. The accessorial charges that had accumulated unvalidated through manual review are now compared against contracted entitlement schedules at the line level — the same process that reduced Accuride’s 72 accessorial charge types to 7 essential ones. Detention and demurrage exposure is now flagged proactively through the Collaboration Agent, which monitors shipment milestones and alerts the drayage providers and carriers before charges accrue rather than after.
The team-dependency problem was addressed by design. Freehand’s AI Agents hold the process logic — the rate cards, the audit rules, the carrier performance thresholds, the GL coding mappings — in a system of record rather than in individual team members’ knowledge. When a team member is promoted or replaced, the process does not degrade. New team members onboard to a system that explains its own decisions rather than learning an undocumented process from whoever sat in the role before them. The lean team the logistics director described is now supported by AI agents that do the routine work, surface the exceptions, and hold the institutional knowledge the team no longer has to carry personally.
The Spend Intelligence Agent produces freight spend visibility by carrier, mode, lane, and region across the full North American network — the data foundation that makes the next procurement cycle smarter than the last. Audit findings from the Audit Agent feed directly into the AI Procurement Analyst’s carrier performance model, closing the loop between what the company paid and what it negotiates next. The platform that Accuride recommended from its own experience is now producing the same outcomes for this company: a lean team doing more, with AI, than a larger team could do without it.
