
Hartwell Freight Services
Regional logistics · 38 employees · $6.8M revenue
Challenge. The board wanted "an AI initiative" and had a $40K customer-chatbot proposal on the table.
What happened. The assessment showed the chatbot solved a problem customers did not have, and found the real bleed in dispatch: four dispatchers retyping bills of lading and proof-of-delivery data into the TMS. Recommendation: kill the chatbot, spend a fraction of the budget on document extraction into the TMS.
Outcomes. $40K misspend avoided outright. Document automation reclaimed 22 dispatcher hours per week and cut billing-document errors 31%, which shortened the invoice-to-payment cycle by 4 days on average. ROI math: 22 hrs x $52 x 4.3 = $4,919 per month gross, minus $210 in tooling, roughly $4,700 monthly net.









