The Problem
The company manufactures mobile computers, barcode scanners, RFID systems, printers, autonomous mobile robots, and machine vision solutions for retail, manufacturing, healthcare, transportation, and logistics industries — serving 80% of Fortune 500 companies in over 100 countries. Its $127M annual freight spend runs across a complex modal mix: 54% air freight, 30% parcel, 7% LTL, 6% ocean, 3% FTL. Trax managed the freight audit. And Trax offered zero metrics on why exceptions occurred.
Thousands of shipment-level exceptions had accumulated in backlog with no structured tracking, no analytics, and no systematic resolution process. Oracle Transportation Management, Oracle ERP, and Trax operated as disconnected silos — mismatches between shipment references, invoice numbers, and cost centers required constant manual reconciliation. The data lived in three places. None of them shared it automatically. Finance teams couldn’t access shipment details; logistics couldn’t see GL impacts. Every cross-functional question required someone to pull from multiple systems and reconcile manually.
The GL allocation problem was the most operationally costly. The company’s 8-segment GL structure — with over 200 allocation rules that differed by region and shipment type — had no centralized repository. No automated logic applied the rules. Every invoice required manual intervention to assign the correct combination of company code, cost center, account, product, project, and intercompany codes. Frequent overrides for edge cases. Recurring exceptions during audits. Rate management ran by email without automation — carrier rate changes and spot quote validations queued for human handling with no approval workflows or benchmarking integration.
What Freehand Did
Freehand replaced Trax in a 20-week implementation — the fastest deployment timeline the company had evaluated among the platforms in its RFI process. The Audit Agent activated across the full modal network: air, parcel, LTL, ocean, and FTL in a unified audit workflow. The Knowledge Graph integration normalized data from OTM, Oracle ERP, and carrier sources into a single coherent data model — eliminating the silo reconciliation that had consumed analyst hours every cycle. The exception backlog that had accumulated under Trax was cleared systematically through the Exception and Dispute Agent’s AI categorization and carrier collaboration workflows.
The 200-plus GL allocation rules were automated through the GL Coding Agent. Every rule was codified — 8 dimensions, 200-plus combinations, regional variations — into a configurable logic engine that applies the correct allocation automatically based on shipment characteristics. Edge cases that had previously required manual overrides are handled by fallback logic with a finance review queue for novel scenarios. Manual intervention in GL coding is now the exception rather than the standard. The month-end close that had required significant manual cleanup of GL errors now runs against allocations the system has validated during the payment cycle.
The AI Procurement Analyst replaced the email-based rate change and spot quote validation process with automated workflows — rate ingestion, approval routing, and market benchmarking against DAT, Xeneta, and FreightWaves running continuously rather than on manual request. The Spend Intelligence Agent delivers conversational analytics with first-pass match rate tracking, accrual forecasting, and exception root-cause dashboards — the visibility into audit performance that Trax had never provided. $127M in annual freight spend managed with 85% EDI automation and 100% audit coverage globally. The decades-old outsourced audit provider is replaced by an insourced AI platform the company owns and operates on its own terms.
