Same-day shipment visibility on top of CargoWise, without touching the ERP

The problem

The operations team lived inside CargoWise, the industry ERP, plus a routine of manually exported spreadsheets. Getting daily visibility of shipments was slow, the exports went stale the moment they were made, and the shipments that actually needed attention hid inside ERP screens and reports. The ERP held the data, but the day-to-day question, which shipments need someone on them right now, had no fast answer.

Why the usual answers fail

More ERP reports do not solve it: the shipments that need attention keep hiding inside them, and someone still has to go looking. More frequent spreadsheet exports just produce fresher snapshots that go stale the same way. And a tool that writes back into the ERP is a hard sell to IT, because any bug in the integration could corrupt the data the whole operation depends on.

What we built

Cazullo built FreightOps, an operations workspace synced with CargoWise through the eAdapter integration in read-only mode. It reads shipments, statuses, milestones, and documents, and it never writes back. There is zero risk to ERP data, and CargoWise remains the system of record.

• The team opens a clean daily workspace instead of navigating ERP screens
• Shipments needing attention surface as exceptions instead of hiding in reports
• Management sees the operation without asking anyone for exports
• The sync is read-only by design, so the ERP data cannot be touched

How it works in practice

The team starts the day in the workspace, not in the ERP. Current shipments, statuses, milestones, and documents are already there, synced from CargoWise. Anything that needs attention is surfaced as an exception, so the work of the day is a list to act on rather than reports to dig through. When management wants to see the operation, they open the same workspace instead of requesting a spreadsheet.

What we learned

• Read-only integration removed the adoption blocker: the fear of a new tool touching the ERP is what usually stops these projects, and a sync that cannot write cannot corrupt anything
• An ops tool has to mirror how the team actually works its day, not how the ERP organizes data
• Surfacing exceptions beats better reporting: the team needs to know which shipments need attention, not another view of all of them