A UK-headquartered freight forwarding and customs brokerage group with over two decades in operation, running four divisions across freight forwarding, warehousing, European transport, and international logistics. The group operates across the UK, the Netherlands, and Australia, handling sea, air, road, and rail freight with customs warehouse facilities and its own bills of lading as a licensed NVOCC. A multiple award-winning business, built on infrastructure investment and technology adoption across complex, multi-modal supply chains.
The group runs CargoWise as its core operational platform. The Tariff module was licensed. The autorating engine — automated carrier rating that calculates freight rates based on origin, destination, and carrier — was available and ready to deploy.
But every shipment was still being rated by hand.
About the Client
The Problem Was Data
At the volume this business was handling across its carrier network, manual rating was the single most commercially exposed function in the operation. Quotes took longer than the market would wait. Two people rating the same lane produced different numbers. Pricing errors surfaced weeks later at invoice reconciliation, long after the margin had already been given away. There was no audit trail for how any rate had been derived, and no system-level consistency between one quote and the next.
The auto-rating engine inside CargoWise was designed to eliminate all of it. But auto-rating runs on reference data. For this business, activating auto-rating across its carrier network required four million postcodes loaded into the Tariff module — four million rows of structured location data the rating engine would use to match every origin and destination to the correct carrier rate.
Without that data loaded, the most commercially valuable capability in the platform sat dormant. Every day it stayed dormant was another day of manual rating, margin exposure, and inconsistent pricing across the network.
Four million postcodes. Tariff data uploads process in batches of 500 lines. That meant roughly eight thousand individual submissions into a live production environment — each one requiring validation after upload, because a single corrupted batch would embed bad reference data into the rating engine. Bad postcodes produce wrong rates, silently, across every quote that touches the affected lanes.
The group could not execute a migration at this scale alongside day-to-day operations. The task required dedicated CargoWise tariff expertise, unbroken execution capacity, and zero tolerance for error across eight thousand consecutive uploads — while the live environment kept processing freight without interruption.
SFL Care
SFL Care is SFL's managed CargoWise support discipline, covering the full platform lifecycle: pre-live readiness, go-live stabilisation, post-live continuity, and continuous platform optimisation. Care consultants work directly inside the client's CargoWise environment — hands-on, executing the work, not advising from the sideline. Configuration, migration, troubleshooting, automation builds, compliance updates, tariff management, reporting, user training. Whatever the platform requires, Care delivers it.
152+ logistics businesses are on Care today. Over 50,000 tickets resolved to date. Platinum-accredited, ITIL-aligned, SLA-backed.
For this engagement, the group needed Care to take ownership of a data migration that was too large, too technical, and too operationally sensitive to run internally and deliver it without a single disruption to live operations.
What SFL Care Delivered
Care assigned consultants across multiple time zones and ran the migration as a continuous relay. While the client's team went home for the day, SFL's kept uploading. The work did not pause for evenings or weekends.
Four million postcodes were broken into structured batches of 500 lines, each formatted to the Tariff module's import specifications. Every batch was validated after submission — accuracy, completeness, zero data corruption confirmed before the next batch began. The cadence had to be fast enough to complete within the window and careful enough that speed did not introduce errors the rating engine would inherit.
Ninety hours from first upload, the migration was complete. The live environment had not been interrupted for a single transaction. Shipments processed, customs cleared, invoices went out. The tariff data loaded underneath the running system, and the first thing the operations team noticed was that autorating worked.
The Results
- Autorating activated across the full carrier network — the capability that had been licensed and dormant was live, calculating rates from four million validated postcodes across every origin and destination the business serves
- Manual tariff evaluation eliminated — the process that had required a person for every quote, every lane, every shipment was replaced by system-calculated rates. The team that had spent hours each day looking up and keying in tariffs was freed to do work that grows the business
- Pricing consistency and margin protection restored — every rate now derived from the same validated dataset, applied the same way, every time. No more inconsistency between people, no more errors discovered at invoice reconciliation weeks after the margin was already lost
- 90 hours, zero downtime — the entire migration executed inside a live production environment processing real freight. No scheduled outage. No disruption to customs, invoicing, or shipment operations. The business did not lose a single hour of productivity
- Full audit trail on every rate — where manual rating left no record of how a rate had been derived, every autorated quote now carries system-level traceability from postcode to carrier to rate
- Ongoing Care partnership secured — the precision and speed of the delivery gave the group confidence to extend the Care relationship beyond this engagement
Is There a CargoWise Capability Your Business Cannot Switch On Alone?
Autorating, tariff automation, compliance configuration, reporting — the capability is inside your platform. Sometimes what stands between you and it is a data task your team cannot execute at the scale, speed, or precision the business requires.
SFL Care is hands-on CargoWise execution — inside your environment, by Platinum-accredited consultants, under SLA. 152+ logistics businesses supported. 50,000+ tickets resolved.
About SFL
SFL is a CargoWise All-Platinum Certified Service Partner — the highest accreditation WiseTech Global awards — with Platinum certification held across every module including Forwarding, Accounting, Customs, Warehousing, Workflow, Integration, and Global Rollouts. With 895+ implementations delivered across 50+ countries, 250+ integration clients, and 60+ CargoWise-certified specialists, SFL works exclusively within the CargoWise ecosystem to build the implementations, integrations, automations, and operational infrastructure logistics businesses need to grow.
SFL Care is SFL's managed CargoWise support discipline — 152+ businesses supported, 50,000+ tickets resolved, Platinum-accredited, ITIL-aligned, SLA-backed.
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