The Problem
The company operates an omnichannel fulfillment model spanning flagship stores, fulfillment centers, and a significant e-commerce business — all requiring coordinated inbound and outbound logistics across multiple carriers, modes, and delivery appointment windows. $265M in annual freight spend moved across this network without a unified platform to manage sourcing, execution, audit, or payment. Transportation planning, carrier procurement, and invoice validation each operated in separate systems with manual handoffs between them. The fragmentation was not just operational — it had financial consequences: the gap between what was contracted and what was paid was wide and not systematically measurable.
The fulfillment center delivery appointment process was a specific operational pressure point. Inbound vendor shipments required precise scheduling coordination — the kind of dock management complexity that compounds quickly at the scale of a luxury retail network. Without a centralized TMS and appointment scheduling capability, coordination burden fell on operations teams managing emails, portals, and phone calls. Delivery exceptions and detention charges accumulated without a proactive mechanism to prevent them upstream. The cost of this operational gap was real but invisible because no system was tracking it.
The company required more than a technology deployment. It needed an implementation partner who could own the delivery complexity — process mapping, integration architecture, change management, and ongoing operational governance across multiple internal teams and external carrier relationships. Freehand was selected alongside PwC as the managed service delivery partner, bringing the program governance structure needed to execute three product lines simultaneously without consuming the company’s internal bandwidth.
What Freehand Did
Freehand deployed Freight Audit and Payment, the TMS, and Procurement as a unified implementation — one platform, one data layer, one program governance structure with PwC owning the delivery organization. The managed service model meant PwC handled project management, process mapping, integration coordination, and change management, with Freehand providing the AI platform and operational configuration. The company’s internal teams focused on decisions and outcomes rather than implementation mechanics — a deliberate design choice for an organization whose internal IT bandwidth was committed to other transformation priorities.
The TMS deployment established the execution foundation — carrier master setup, Rate Manager Agent configuration, and inbound shipment planning across the fulfillment network. The AI Procurement Analyst structured the initial carrier sourcing events, normalizing the rate landscape across the network before the audit layer activated. Delivery appointment scheduling was mapped and deployed at the fulfillment center level, replacing the ad-hoc coordination process with structured dock scheduling: vendors and carriers see available windows, DC teams receive advance load timing, and the Collaboration Agent tracks appointment confirmations and flags potential conflicts before detention charges accrue.
The Freight Audit and Payment layer activates on top of the TMS execution data — the Audit Agent always validates against the contracted rate the TMS sourced, not against a rate card maintained separately and potentially stale. Invoice ingestion covers all carrier formats across modes. The GL Coding Agent automates cost allocation by fulfillment center, mode, carrier, and cost center. The Spend Intelligence Agent gives the finance and supply chain teams a real-time view of committed spend and audited actuals — the single pane of glass across all freight categories that had not existed before.
The closed loop closes through the AI Procurement Analyst. Audit findings — billing discrepancy patterns, accessorial trends, carrier performance data — feed directly into the next sourcing event as evidence for negotiation. The company does not renegotiate carrier contracts based on what it believes it should have paid; it negotiates based on what it can prove it was overcharged. PwC’s managed service governance ensures the program runs to outcome milestones, not just deployment milestones — the implementation that delivered three product lines simultaneously became the operating standard across the entire fulfillment network.
