The Problem
The company is the Netherlands' largest supermarket chain with 137 years of history, operating over 1,100 stores with 110,000 employees and commanding 37.5% market share. As part of one of the world's largest retail groups, the company manages one of Europe's most complex grocery supply chains — processing over 1 million order lines daily through six national DCs, five regional DCs, eight e-commerce fulfillment centers, and 31 contracted carriers handling 84,000 annual shipments. €330M in annual freight spend. 20,000 weekly shipments across fresh, frozen, and ambient categories. The freight finance platform managing all of it was Oracle Transportation Management version 6.3.3 — a system that had been out of vendor support for years and was crashing during peak periods.
When OTM crashed, invoice processing stopped. Completely. Teams rebuilt a week's worth of work manually after each failure. In a grocery supply chain where fresh and frozen categories run on tight delivery windows and carrier payment terms, a week-long processing backlog was not a technical inconvenience — it was a financial and operational exposure. Carriers had responded to the extended payment uncertainty by building rate premiums into their bids to compensate for cash flow variability. The 15-day audit cycle was not a process choice. It was the minimum the failing system could produce.
The €2M annual GL misallocation was systematic rather than random. OTM's primitive GL mapping logic incorrectly assigned freight costs across the 1,100-store network — not randomly, but in structured patterns that distorted store P&L reports for regional managers making decisions about store operations, supplier relationships, and category performance. Two freight analysts spent 40-plus hours per week manually updating carrier contracts across disconnected systems and supplementary spreadsheets, with 3-to-4-day lags when fuel surcharges or base rates changed in volatile European markets. Zero automated discrepancy detection meant billing errors moved through 20,000 weekly shipments without systematic validation.
What Freehand Did
Freehand replaced OTM 6.3.3 with cloud-native AI agent infrastructure that processes 20,000 weekly shipments continuously — no system crashes, no peak-period failures, no week of manual reconstruction. The Invoice Ingestion Agent processes invoices from all 31 carriers across fresh, frozen, and ambient categories in the formats carriers already use. The 15-day audit cycle that had strained carrier relationships and driven rate premiums is guaranteed at 5 days — carriers now receive payment faster on clean invoices, the rate premiums that had compensated for payment uncertainty are eliminated, and the relationships that support a 37.5% market share grocery operation are stabilized.
The Rate Manager Agent replaced the 40-hours-per-week manual rate update process with live, version-controlled contract management across all 31 carriers. When fuel surcharge rates change in volatile European markets, the Rate Manager updates automatically — no manual upload, no 3-to-4-day lag, no invoices processing against a stale rate schedule. The bi-weekly rate update cycle that had consumed two senior analysts is now automated. Those analysts now focus on carrier strategy and network optimization rather than on contract maintenance.
The €2M GL misallocation is resolved by the GL Coding Agent — a configurable allocation engine that assigns the correct store code, cost center, and financial period to every freight cost based on delivery location, shipment type, carrier, and mode. The structured misallocation pattern that had distorted store P&L reports is eliminated. Regional managers receive accurate freight cost data for the operational and commercial decisions that €2M in annual misallocations had been compromising. The Audit Agent autonomously identifies and recovers 80-plus billing discrepancies per week — rate mismatches, duplicates, uncontracted accessorials — and the Collaboration Agent manages carrier dispute communication. The infrastructure that had been failing the company's freight finance function has been replaced. The guarantee is 5 days. It is a contractual commitment, not a target.
