The Problem
The company — established in 1924, the fifth-largest winery in America and third-largest exporter of branded wine from the USA — manages a genuinely complex multi-modal supply chain across 16 million cases annually. Wines across the company's brand portfolio move through ocean imports (2,000 shipments), over-the-road tankers (3,000 shipments), intermodal and drayage (3,000 shipments), domestic truckload (7,000 shipments), rail (100 shipments), and LTL distribution — across 14 TL carriers, 3 LTL carriers, and 3 ocean carriers. The logistics director managing this network relied entirely on manual freight audit with paper invoices, no centralized rate card library, and no systematic exception detection.
The agency import business created the specific allocation problem that no standard FAP platform was designed to solve. For wines imported on behalf of foreign wineries — including direct-import channels where the company sells wines it does not produce — ocean freight costs had to be allocated back to cost of goods at the SKU level, accounting for cube factor differences between a 6-pack case and a 12-pack case on the same container. The company built pricing condition tables in SAP at the start of each year — expected cost per case per SKU based on anticipated ocean rates. Six months later, when the actual invoice arrived, the rate had shifted and the container mix had changed. Reconciling actual freight cost to cost of goods required the logistics director to build the allocation calculation manually. Two days. Every reporting cycle.
The SAP migration underway — a six-month process review ahead of full ERP implementation — constrained the deployment window. Any platform had to go live with minimal IT dependency during the transition period. The timing pressure was real: October through December is the harvest-to-holiday peak when the finance team needs accurate cost data most urgently. Missing that window meant another year of two-day manual reports at the highest-stakes moment of the operating calendar.
What Freehand Did
Freehand deployed FAP using email-based PDF ingestion — no ERP integration required for go-live, no disruption to the SAP migration timeline. The Invoice Ingestion Agent normalizes invoices from all 20-plus carriers across every mode: ocean, tanker, intermodal, domestic TL, LTL, and rail. The Audit Agent validates every invoice against digitized rate cards — the manual paper-based audit that had consumed extensive internal resources is now autonomous. 50–70% productivity increase for the logistics team is the direct output of removing the manual invoice review cycle across 15,100-plus annual shipments.
The per-SKU ocean freight cost allocation — the two-day manual calculation — is automated through the Costing Agent. Cube factor tables for each SKU are loaded as configurable business rules: 6-pack cases, 12-pack cases, and other case configurations across the brand portfolio — each with known cube factors that determine how freight cost per case is calculated for a mixed-SKU container. When an ocean invoice arrives, the Costing Agent reads the SKU mix from the shipment manifest, applies the cube-factor logic, and produces the per-case cost breakdown by wine brand that cost accounting needs — available the same day the invoice is processed, not two days later. The pricing condition tables the logistics director had been maintaining manually in SAP are now managed in Freehand, with variance between provisioned and actual costs visible in real time.
The SAP integration activates via SFTP as the migration stabilizes — the Costing Agent's output feeds directly into cost of goods calculations for each brand, and the Spend Intelligence Agent produces the spend-by-lane-by-vendor-by-brand report that had previously required two days of manual assembly. The harvest-to-holiday peak now closes with audited actuals by wine brand, on demand, from a single platform. A company 100 years in business — runs freight audit with the same precision it applies to winemaking.
