- Problem
- A global freight forwarder (~$60M EBITDA) ran core operations across fragmented tooling between CRM, TMS, and finance. Leadership lacked a consolidated view of where labor accumulated across customer segments (FCL, LCL, project cargo) and internal teams including marketing. Manual bridges between systems limited visibility into where automation would stick and where judgment work had to stay with staff.
- Action
- Conducted process mining and structured stakeholder interviews across commercial, operations, finance, and marketing to reconstruct end-to-end workflows across FCL, LCL, and project cargo segments. Established time-in-motion baselines by role and system handoff, then mapped where labor accumulated across CRM, TMS, and finance tooling with no single source of truth. Sized automation and AI augmentation opportunities by segment with ROI ranges, implementation effort estimates, and change-management risk flags. Built and deployed production tooling for marketing workflow augmentation and selected operational automations on durable agent runtimes with guardrails, VM sandboxing around tool calls, and human-in-the-loop approval via Microsoft Teams bots. Scoped remaining operations work into a phased roadmap that separated high-volume transactional moves from complex cargo requiring experienced staff judgment.
- Result
- Identified seven figures in combined annual cost reduction and revenue uplift opportunities across customer segments and internal teams. Marketing and operations automations running in production reduced manual handoffs on targeted workflows, with escalation handling routing exceptions back to staff when automation confidence thresholds were not met. Delivered a segment-level automation register, executive readout, and implementation roadmap sequenced by ROI and operational risk so leadership could fund the next wave without re-running discovery.