The Problem
The company operates in over 100 countries with 115,000-plus employees, managing a highly complex global supply chain moving specialized drilling equipment, personnel, and materials to remote locations — from Siberian tundra to offshore Brazil — with 250,000-plus annual shipments across air, ocean, trucking, parcel, customs, and warehousing modes. Its freight audit was outsourced through nVision and Control Pay: two vendors that provided limited line-item visibility, no root-cause analytics on why exceptions occurred, and slow cycle times that prevented real-time spend decisions. The outsourced model created the same structural dependency the company was trying to eliminate — reliance on external vendors whose incentives were not aligned with finding and fixing the root causes of billing errors.
The complexity of the company’s freight portfolio amplified every limitation. SAP ERP and Oracle Transportation Management struggled with multi-leg shipments requiring multiple invoice matches per shipment. Planned costs existed in OTM but the audit logic couldn’t reconcile complex routing scenarios — a shipment moving from a Texas facility through customs to a Kazakhstan drilling site through an intermediary forwarder generated a multi-leg invoice that neither nVision nor Control Pay was architecturally equipped to validate comprehensively. Rate cards for 400-plus carriers across multiple modes, regions, and currencies had no centralized repository — causing frequent mismatches and manual rate lookups that added latency to every audit cycle.
Pre-invoice accrual visibility was absent from SAP. Finance teams lacked predictive spend forecasting, impacting budget control and month-end close accuracy across global operations. Manual exception resolution with no carrier collaboration tools meant teams spent weeks chasing carriers for clarifications on customs invoices, storage charges, and duty discrepancies through fragmented email threads with no tracking, no escalation logic, and no documented resolution history.
What Freehand Did
Freehand replaced both nVision and Control Pay with an AI agent platform that delivers 95-plus percent audit accuracy with same-day processing — replacing the weeks-long manual review cycles that had been the operating standard. The Audit Agent’s semantic understanding maps multi-leg journeys, matching invoices to shipments regardless of routing complexity. A Kazakhstan drilling site shipment with seven legs and four intermediate parties is matched correctly because the system understands the journey, not just the endpoint.
The Rate Manager Agent provides a centralized, version-controlled rate library with automated rate application across all modes and currencies — the 400-plus carrier contracts that had operated without a repository now live in one place with versioning, effective-date logic, and multi-currency support. The Costing Agent calculates expected costs from shipment data, delivering real-time accruals to SAP before invoices arrive. The finance teams that had managed month-end close on estimates now close on actuals, with predictive budget accuracy available throughout the period rather than discovered at close.
The Collaboration Agent autonomously emails carriers, tracks responses, and resolves discrepancies with full audit trail — replacing the weeks-long manual email chase for customs invoices, storage charges, and duty clarifications with a structured, automated workflow. 98-plus percent duplicate detection across 250,000-plus annual shipments prevents overpayments before they occur. The 85% cost reduction versus the legacy BPO vendors reflects both the elimination of nVision and Control Pay subscription costs and the FTE reduction from 60% lower AP processing effort. The outsourced audit that provided limited visibility and slow cycle times has been replaced by an AI platform that the company operates directly, with full transparency into every audit decision.
