Like most freight forwarders, Mainfreight had always sought to improve operational efficiency, but often fell into making process changes reactively, after a shipment missed or a service failure that shouldn't have happened.
Freight forwarding operations are inherently variable: vessel delays, documentation exceptions, customs holds. The question isn't whether problems will occur. It's whether you see them in time to do something about them.
Mainfreight's teams were skilled and experienced, but the work was invisible. There was no single view of what was in progress, what was at risk, or where the queue was building. Workloads weren't balanced across the team. The signal that something was going wrong was usually a customer complaint.
ViAGO implemented the CargoWise One Productivity Suite across the Mainfreight Air & Ocean Australia operation, configuring workflow visualisation across the shipment lifecycle.
Mainfreight staff were engaged in planning and implementation from the start, not handed a finished system. That mattered: the people who understand where the problems actually occur are the operators, not the consultants.
The configuration mapped each critical milestone in the sea and air import and export workflow, created visibility of work in progress, and surfaced the constraint: which jobs were at risk, which queues were building, and which teams were under or overloaded.
Like most freight forwarders, Mainfreight has always sought out ways to improve the efficiency of our operations.
We've done this across freight forwarding and customs brokerage operations at scale. If you're on CargoWise, we can tell you quickly what configuration would give you the same visibility.