About the client
The client is one of the largest apparel manufacturers in South Asia. Known for its design-to-delivery model, it supplies leading global fashion brands and manages the full chain, from design and manufacturing through inbound raw materials to outbound finished goods.
The company buys ocean and air freight in two streams: long-term contracts for its core lanes, and spot buys for urgent, seasonal and overflow cargo.
The challenge
“For a business shipping fashion on tight seasonal deadlines, the freight operation was running on goodwill and inboxes.”
Every time the team needed rates, someone built an Excel sheet, emailed it to a list of forwarders and waited. Replies came back by email, WhatsApp and phone, each in a different format, each bundling surcharges differently. Someone then rebuilt every quote by hand just to compare them. A single RFQ could take days, and decisions were often made before all the quotes were in.
The problems did not stop at procurement. Once cargo was booked the team had no live view of where it was, so rollovers and delays surfaced late, usually through a forwarder email. Freight invoices were paid without being matched to the agreed rate, so overcharges and duplicate charges slipped through. And there was no audit trail showing who requested what, who quoted, and why a provider won.
Why they chose Swyftflo
The company did not want to fix one problem and create three more. A sourcing tool on its own would still leave tracking in inboxes and invoices on spreadsheets, and leave the team stitching data together by hand.
What made Swyftflo the right fit was that one partner could carry a freight requirement from the first RFQ to the final payment. A rate agreed in procurement is the same rate used to book the shipment and to check the invoice. They also needed a partner who would bring their forwarders on board, and give them enterprise-level control without the cost and rollout of a legacy procurement suite.
What we implemented
We did not hand the company a login and walk away. We worked alongside its procurement, operations and finance teams to rebuild how freight was bought, moved and paid for, one stage at a time, starting where the pain was sharpest.
Stage 1 — procurement rebuilt around how the team actually buys. We mapped every lane, every mode and every forwarder, then turned the old Excel sheets into ready-made requirement templates for ocean and air. A request that took an afternoon to prepare now takes seconds and reaches every relevant provider in one click. The bigger job was bringing the forwarders with us: we onboarded more than 25 logistics service providers, including some of the largest global forwarders, and walked each one through quoting on the platform. Rather than forcing a standard quote format on them, providers submit their existing rate sheets and an AI agent extracts and consolidates everything into one standardised view with surcharges broken out line by line, so costs compare like for like.
Stage 2 — every agreed rate connected to every booking. Awarded rates are linked to bookings in Swyftflo S2P, so every shipment moves at the price the team negotiated. We set lane allocation rules with operations: a primary provider per lane, with agreed backups for peak season when capacity tightens. Booking confirmations and shipping documents moved off email into one shared place.
Stage 3 — eyes on every shipment. The company was managing hundreds of ocean and air shipments across multiple providers, each supplying daily Excel reports the team had to consolidate by hand, with gaps chased across carrier websites. Control Tower now tracks shipments automatically across integrated lines, which removed most of the manual reporting effort and gave production planners, factories and supply chain teams timely information without having to ask the logistics team for it.
Stage 4 — paying only what was agreed. With finance, we set up Invoice Hub to check every freight invoice against the contract, PO, proof of work, confirmations and GRN before approval. Tolerance rules let clean invoices pass straight through, while overcharges, unapproved surcharges and duplicates are flagged for review. The approval chain mirrors the company's own sign-off rules, giving a full audit trail behind every payment.
The results
“The biggest change was not speed. It was control.”
The company now knows what it buys, what it pays and how its providers perform. All stakeholders see the same picture, so spend, contracts and provider performance are visible to everyone and the argument over whose spreadsheet is right is over. Money stopped leaking: off-contract buying, hidden surcharges and invoice errors that were once absorbed are now caught and fixed. Savings arrived early, from chat negotiation alone, leaving reverse auctions in reserve for future tenders.
Peak season got calmer, because exceptions are flagged early and the team spends less time firefighting ahead of brand deadlines. Lanes now go to the best performers, awarded on scorecards rather than the cheapest quote or the strongest relationship. And the team moved back to customers, spending the time freed from manual work on retention and new business.
