Case Study · SMB · regional freight brokerage · 68 people
Northfield Logistics recovered $420K in vendor leakage in one quarter.
How a regional freight brokerage turned three years of unread vendor contracts into a live renegotiation queue.
Challenge
The problem behind the problem.
Northfield had the classic SMB vendor-management problem: 140+ active contracts, none of them re-read since signing, and a COO with a strong suspicion that rates had drifted, clauses had auto-triggered, and SLAs weren't being enforced. Nobody on the team had the bandwidth to read them.
Their existing procurement tool was a glorified PDF folder. Any insight required someone to open a contract and read it.
Solution
What we actually shipped.
We ingested every active contract, amendment, and SOW. We parsed them against a structured schema: clauses, rates, SLAs, renewal terms, indemnities. We benchmarked rates against market data and their own historical spend. And we produced a risk report flagging unfavorable indexing clauses, auto-renew traps, and non-compliant SLAs.
Then we built a prioritized renegotiation queue of the top 30 vendors, each with a ready-to-use renegotiation brief. Northfield's team ran the actual conversations. We never sit across from your suppliers.
In their words
"We thought we were buying AI. What we actually bought back is our own operating leverage."
— COO, Northfield Logistics
Result
The number on the retainer report.
By the end of Q1, Northfield had closed renegotiations with 18 of the top 30 vendors and recovered $420K in annualized savings. The procurement copilot we built is now used on every new SOW ('is this better or worse than our standard terms?') and has saved another estimated $80K in avoided unfavorable deals.
Northfield is on an Enterprise retainer with dedicated vendor intelligence tooling and a quarterly procurement review.
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