From three brokerages to one daily briefing. This is how Airco unified its freight and gained AI-powered visibility
Airco Brands is a 100% Australian-owned and operated company, designing, developing and supplying trade-quality fasteners, tools and compressors under trusted brands including Otter, Senco, Colt and Cobra. Airco services trade, OEM and DIY/retail customers across Australia and New Zealand, operating a high-volume freight network with 35 to 40 carriers, spanning air satchels and carton work through to full truckloads and ongoing replenishment programmes.
“"One of the key benefits of Freight People is the ability to have them as an extension of our business, having them accountable for projected future savings, efficiencies and carrier performance to help improve our business moving forward."
Adam Helder, National Operations Manager, Airco
35–40 carriers
Air satchels, cartons, full truckloads
Australia & New Zealand
3rd party logistics model
Opportunity
Airco's freight operations had outgrown the fragmented approach that had served the business for years. Before moving to Freight People, Airco worked with three 4PL brokerages and maintained multiple direct carrier relationships. With freight execution split across regions, carriers and systems, and limited integration with Airco's SAP Business One environment, the business had no simple way to see its true cost to serve or delivery performance in real time.
That created three specific challenges:
- Fragmented execution across countries, carriers and systems, with different regions using different tools and carrier processes, making it difficult to standardise reporting and operational control across Australia and New Zealand.
- Limited visibility into freight costs and margin impact, with inconsistent data and separate systems making it hard to understand freight as a percentage of sales, carrier performance and the true cost to serve.
- Too much operational interpretation was required of leaders. What Airco's freight team needed wasn't more dashboards, but decision-ready insight that surfaced exceptions, trends and cost opportunities without hours of manual data digging.
As Airco put it: before Freight People, with multiple freight management systems and carrier information sources, the business could never get a true read on its freight-to-sales percentage or on its customer experience.
Outcomes
Freight People, powered by the Cario platform, consolidated Airco's freight management into a single, connected system integrated with SAP Business One. This gave Airco:
- TECHNOLOGY: Full integration with SAP B1, with sales order information automatically flowing into Cario the moment an order is completed in the warehouse, including customer details, reference numbers and delivery information.
- AUTOMATION: Least-cost routing is automatically allocated for every customer, removing the manual, error-prone work of consigning and entering dispatch information by hand.
- CONSOLIDATION: One freight management system and one reporting mechanism replace three separate 4PL brokerages and multiple direct carrier relationships, giving Airco a true view of freight percentage to revenue, rebate group reporting and carrier performance for the first time.
- VISIBILITY: Advance shipping notifications have been rolled out so Airco's customers can go directly to Freight People for real-time PODs, ETAs and damage updates, reducing lag on customer enquiries while keeping Airco's customer service team in the loop.
"This has had a massive improvement on our ability to get orders out the door quicker. It's taken away human error on having to manually consign and add information into the dispatch system, which has driven simplicity all the way through our business."
Adam Helder, National Operations Manager, Airco
Airco’s first steps with AI
Building on this integrated freight foundation, Freight People and Cario introduced Airco's first AI-powered capability. It is a daily executive briefing that turns freight execution data into natural-language insights. Rather than requiring Airco's leaders to work through dashboards, reports, and operational metrics, the briefing converts freight trends, exceptions, manifest performance, and cost optimisation opportunities into a concise summary, cutting what used to take hours of data interrogation to about three minutes.
"Instead of spending time searching for answers, our leaders receive meaningful insights that help them focus on opportunities, risks and actions that improve business outcomes."
Adam Helder, National Operations Manager, Airco
With a single, automated freight platform in place, Airco now has the foundation and visibility to resolve day-to-day freight issues quickly, and to keep adapting as its network, carriers and freight needs evolve.
Airco and Freight People will continue to build on the daily executive briefing, extending it to cover further freight stats, cost optimisation and trend analysis as new use cases are identified.