The Problem
The company is a diversified industrial technology manufacturer headquartered in the United States, empowering a sustainable, connected, and safer world. Founded in 1927, the company operates 40-plus manufacturing and engineering facilities across 15-plus countries, serves 100,000-plus customers across automotive, industrial, transportation, and electronics markets, and generates $2.5B in annual revenue. Its global freight spend of $75M — across 363,000-plus annual shipments covering parcel, LTL, ocean, and air — was managed through a highly customized SAP ERP that had a fundamental audit limitation: it could only audit freight, fuel, and discount charges. Accessorial charges, DIM weight mismatches, and complex pricing components were completely outside SAP’s audit scope. Business units manually approved invoices without knowledge of contracted rates — blind payments against an incomplete audit framework.
Rate cards were scattered across SharePoint files and SAP with no centralized system. Multiple carriers — FedEx, DHL, UPS, TNT — appeared across regions in different configurations with different data. The vendor master problem was acute: FedEx alone was listed 30 different ways across the company’s eight ERP instances, each with different payment terms, different addresses, and potentially different rate logic. Nobody had consolidated them. 25% of finance-booked freight spend had no audit trail — not audited incorrectly, but not audited at all. The director of global transportation had never produced a true global freight spend report because the data to build one did not exist in any single accessible form.
A December 2025 acquisition added an unknown volume of freight spend to the company’s network. The transportation coordinator from the acquired company was unknown to the company’s logistics team. The volumes, the carriers, the spend — all unknown, and all additive to a problem that was already unsized. The platform requirement was explicit: go live without waiting for SAP to be re-customized, operate through email-based invoice ingestion from day one, and produce audited GL outputs that could post to whichever ERP corresponded to each entity.
What Freehand Did
Freehand deployed the AI Procurement Analyst first — running the small parcel procurement event that produced $2.4M in savings. The event handled bid collection, normalization, anomaly detection, scenario modeling, and award recommendation autonomously: the team reviewed outputs, not raw data. The savings were the direct result of AI-driven carrier selection against live market benchmarks rather than the manual process that had run in prior cycles. The global forwarding RFP followed using the same platform, extending the AI procurement capability to the company’s largest international freight category.
The freight audit deployment used a single monitored email inbox — all carriers across all regions and all 8 ERP instances submit invoices to one address. The Invoice Ingestion Agent normalizes every format from every carrier. Critically, the audit scope covers what SAP was structurally incapable of auditing: accessorial charges, DIM weight validation, complex multi-carrier pricing, and the 25% of spend that had no audit trail. The Audit Agent validates every invoice line against the contracted entitlement — not just freight, fuel, and discount, but every charge type. The Rate Manager Agent consolidates FedEx’s 30 vendor master entries into a single normalized carrier identity with correct payment terms applied consistently.
The GL Coding Agent maps each invoice to the correct ERP — SAP for 80% of the business, Oracle, Sage, and JD Edwards for the rest — via SFTP flat file, with minimal IT lift required during the initial deployment. The acquired company’s volumes will be incorporated into the same platform as integration is completed. The Spend Intelligence Agent produces the global freight spend report the company has never had: every carrier, every entity, every mode, across all regions and all acquired businesses in a single view. The 25% spend gap with no audit trail is now in scope. The $75M in global freight spend is now visible — and audited.
