This freight forwarding operation was processing dozens of shipments per week. The pre-alert workflow meant staff forwarding inbound emails to Outlook, manually extracting HBL numbers and consignee details, and copy-pasting into spreadsheets. Every new shipment was another 20-minute round of manual entry — and duplicates slipped through constantly.
Beyond pre-alerts, the commercial side — pricing, sales pipeline, client CRM — lived in a completely separate set of tools with no connection to the operational data.
We built a purpose-built operations platform. Staff drop inbound pre-alert emails (.msg, .eml) or HBL Draft PDFs directly into the system — FreiFo parses HBL, sales reference, consignee, and routing automatically. Duplicate HBLs are detected and skipped before they enter the queue.
From pre-alert, shipments flow through Import, Export, and Annual Bond workflows with full audit trails. The commercial layer — Pricing, Sales, CRM, Pipeline, Companies, Contacts — sits alongside operations and shares the same data model, so a new consignee on a shipment is automatically available in the CRM.
What was a 20-minute-per-shipment manual ritual became a drag-and-drop. The operations team now manages the full import/export cycle — pre-alert to delivery — in one system. The CRM is populated automatically as shipments move through the pipeline, rather than being a separate data entry exercise.