--- description: Inbound freight was spending its week on coordination. A digital coordinator now owns the container lifecycle, from supplier outreach to warehouse arrival. title: "Lamour: a logistics team that stopped chasing suppliers" --- [Skip to content](https://sterlingnorth.partners/cases/lamour-inbound-freight#main) [STERLING NORTH PARTNERS](https://sterlingnorth.partners/?hsLang=en) Menu [Start](https://sterlingnorth.partners/start?hsLang=en) [Keep up](https://sterlingnorth.partners/keep-up?hsLang=en) [Go faster](https://sterlingnorth.partners/go-faster?hsLang=en) [Stay in control](https://sterlingnorth.partners/stay-in-control?hsLang=en) [How we work](https://sterlingnorth.partners/how-we-work?hsLang=en) [Cases](https://sterlingnorth.partners/cases?hsLang=en) [Book a strategy call](https://sterlingnorth.partners/talk?hsLang=en) [FR](https://sterlingnorth.partners/fr/?hsLang=en) Case study · Lamour · Inbound freight # A logistics team that stopped chasing suppliers. How a mid-market fashion manufacturer rebuilt its inbound freight function around a digital coordinator that owns the container lifecycle, and cut manual coordination by more than half in a few months. 50%+ Manual coordination removed 28 days Pre-shipment window managed 24/7 Supplier follow-up and document checks 100% Auditable, every action logged [Watch the video The Inbound Freight Director and Philippe walk through the build, and where the team's time goes now](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2YCNZ1vCJM) Watch this one before reading, if you only have five minutes. The Inbound Freight Director describes the work in her own words, which is worth more than anything we could write about it. The situation Lamour's logistics team was managing thousands of inbound container shipments a year across dozens of overseas suppliers, several freight forwarders and several ports of entry. The work itself was not complex. The volume of coordination, document chasing and reconciliation was consuming the whole week. - Constant manual follow-up with suppliers for cargo-ready dates and volumes. - Container assembly done by hand in spreadsheets, every day. - Bills of lading, commercial invoices and packing lists checked one at a time. - Differences between supplier documents and the order system caught late, sometimes after the container had shipped. - Inconsistent visibility on containers already in transit. The team was not short on talent. It was short on capacity. Every hour spent chasing a supplier was an hour not spent on the work that needed judgment. What we did first ### Map first. Build second. Before anything was built we ran a full diagnostic of the department: every handoff, every system, every document, every escalation path, mapped end to end. Only then did we draw the line between the work that did not require a person and the work that did. #### What the diagnostic produced - A complete map of inbound container logistics, from order to warehouse receipt. - A clean split between deterministic work and judgment work. - Escalation rules: what triggers a human review, and what does not. - Measures to manage the digital coordinator the way you would manage a new hire. #### Where it sits in the organization - Role: inbound freight coordinator. - Department: inbound freight. - Reports to: the Inbound Freight Director. - Measured on cycle time, document compliance, escalation rate and accuracy against the order system. What it owns It does not automate one step. It owns a responsibility, from the moment a cargo-ready window opens twenty-eight days out to the moment the container clears customs and reaches the warehouse. 1. #### Supplier outreach, twenty-eight days out A watch on the order system triggers ahead of each cargo-ready date. The coordinator asks the supplier for volume, cargo-ready date, weight, port of origin and destination, and follows up until the supplier responds. 2. #### Container consolidation With the supplier data in hand it assembles upcoming orders into proposed containers, grouped by cargo-ready date, supplier, desired warehouse date, port of origin and destination. The plan goes to the team for approval. People approve. The coordinator does the arithmetic. 3. #### Booking and confirmation Once a plan is approved it coordinates with the freight forwarders to book the shipments, then confirms the order back to each supplier with the shipping details locked in. 4. #### Final documents As the vessel date approaches it goes back for the bill of lading, the commercial invoice and the packing list, and follows up until every document is in hand, on time and in the right format. 5. #### Document consistency It reads each document and checks them against each other. If the items billed do not match the items packed, it returns the documents to the supplier with a precise note on what to correct, then re-checks when the corrected files arrive. 6. #### Order consistency and escalation Once the documents agree, it compares the shipment against the original order: quantities, item codes, prices and colours. Small quantity differences pass. Anything larger, or a mismatched attribute, goes to a person with the source documents attached and a one-click decision. 7. #### In transit Every day it pulls each container's position from the tracking service and updates the order system with the latest location, projected arrival and customs clearance date, until the container reaches the warehouse. Where the line sits The reconciliation logic is where a digital team member earns its place. Three checkpoints, three different decision rules, each one explicit, auditable and reviewable. ### Documents against each other The invoice, the packing list and the bill of lading are cross-checked for internal consistency. If an item appears on one and not another, the supplier is asked to correct and resubmit. The coordinator handles that loop without involving the team. ### Documents against the order Once the documents agree with each other, they are compared to what was actually ordered. Quantities and prices are matched line by line. Item codes and colours are matched exactly. ### A person decides Small quantity differences with every attribute matching proceed automatically. Anything beyond that threshold goes to a human reviewer with full context. The point is not that it is always right. The point is that it knows the difference. What changed for the people #### Before - Manual emails to suppliers asking for cargo-ready dates. - Consolidation plans built by hand in spreadsheets. - Documents forwarded between forwarders, suppliers and the order system. - Invoices and packing lists read line by line. - Tracking lines called for arrival times. #### Now - Leaders ask questions of the whole container book in plain language and get an answer in the moment. - Specialists review escalations with the context already attached. - Supplier patterns are investigated rather than absorbed. - Time goes into the next round of process improvement rather than into keeping the current one moving. A read-only connection into the order system lets the team query it, run reconciliations and pull reports in plain language without leaving the chat window. Nothing in that system can be changed through that channel. Writes stay with the coordinator, where every change is governed by explicit rules and a full log. That was the level of access everyone was comfortable with, and it is the right default. The result The coordinator reached production inside the department in a matter of months, and the results compounded as the team's time shifted from running the process to improving it. > “The Sterling North team was extremely supportive throughout the project. When hurdles came up, they worked closely with us to troubleshoot, refine the logic, and deliver quick turnarounds when needed. Their responsiveness and willingness to dig into complex operational details made the collaboration very effective.”Shuya Zhai, Inbound Freight Director, Lamour #### How this was sized and run Pebbles and a rock, which is the most common shape for a build of this size. Part of it runs on your existing automation tools, handling the scheduled, rule-driven movements, and can be maintained without specialists. The part that reads documents, reconciles them and decides what needs a human is a built application rather than a configured tool, and that piece needs technical people for as long as it runs. Splitting it that way was deliberate: it keeps the specialist surface as small as the job allows. Which made the second question the first thing settled. See [the three sizes](https://sterlingnorth.partners/how-we-work#how-we-work-sizes) and [who runs it in a year](https://sterlingnorth.partners/how-we-work#how-we-work-ways). ## Start with the bottleneck, not with the tool. 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