Case Study
Autonomous carrier orchestration drives 33% faster fulfillment for a Canadian grocery leader
Multiple contracted 3PL carriers across 30+ cities now run from a single decision layer, cutting shipping costs 15%. The Locus agentic TMS autonomously selects the optimal carrier, creates shipments and labels, and tracks every perishable meal kit through to proof of delivery.
Segment & Geography
- Industry: Retail. Grocery and meal-kit delivery.
- Region: Canada, 30+ cities.
Objectives
- Eliminate daily hours lost to creating orders and labels manually on every transporter's website.
- Match every order to its best-fit carrier on rates, ETAs, and serviceability, without manual lookups.
- Give customers and the support team one live view of every shipment.
Locus Solutions Implemented
- Carrier Agent: autonomous carrier selection across every contracted 3PL partner.
- Hub Agent: runs outbound readiness and carrier handoff as one chain of custody, creating orders and labels automatically.
- Customer Agent: tracks and upholds every shipment to its delivery promise, with real-time alerts.
- Orchestrator Agent: coordinates the decision chain from order readiness to delivered proof.
Impact
faster fulfillment cycle time, order-ready to delivered
reduction in fulfillment costs
less time on manual shipping tasks
faster ticket resolution for customer support
Client Overview
A leading Canadian grocery brand delivers fresh, perishable food, from weekly meal kits to grocery essentials, to homes in more than 30 cities. Every order races a freshness clock, moving through a national fulfillment network and into the hands of several third-party carriers, each with its own cities, rates, and service levels.
As volumes grew, the manual coordination holding that carrier network together became the ceiling on both speed and cost. The brand brought in Locus, the world's first agentic TMS, to make its shipping decisions autonomously, from the moment an order is ready to the proof it arrived.
Business Challenges
- Every shipment began with manual data entry across separate carrier portals. Warehouse associates spent hours each day logging into each one to create orders and print labels, one shipment at a time. For perishable food, every hour lost to data entry was freshness lost in transit.
- Every carrier decision was made manually, against spreadsheets. Carriers shared serviceability sheets, and the team checked each order against them by line, validating addresses manually. Rate and ETA comparisons ran order by order to find the best partner, a judgment that lived in planners' heads and browser tabs, never in a system.
- Once a shipment left the dock, no one could see it. Status sat scattered across carrier portals, so support chased updates ticket by ticket, spending more time finding answers than giving them. And with no active alerting for delays, the first signal of a late order was usually the customer, after the freshness window had already closed.
Solutions Implemented
Locus deployed its TMS agents as the decisioning layer across the brand's fulfillment operation. The brand's order systems stay the system of record; Locus runs as the system of execution, with the Orchestrator Agent coordinating the chain: order readiness, carrier choice, tracking, proof.
Order and label creation now runs autonomously. The Hub Agent treats outbound readiness and carrier handoff as one chain of custody. Integrated by API with every contracted 3PL partner, it creates the order and generates the label the moment a shipment is ready, and the transporter websites drop out of the daily workflow entirely.
Carrier selection became an autonomous decision, governed by the brand's own policies. For every order, the Carrier Agent compares live rates, contracted SLAs, ETAs, and serviceability across the network, with every address validated and corrected automatically before the decision is made. The brand's policies are modeled in the platform, so the agent picks the most reliable carrier every time, the way the team would have, just instantly and consistently. Every delivery also continuously updates and sharpens each carrier’s performance profile for the next decision.
One screen shows every shipment, and delays announce themselves. The Customer Agent tracks each shipment to its delivery promise on a single dashboard: end-to-end status, full audit history, and proof of delivery, including customer signatures and delivery images. Customers track the same journey on a branded tracking page, sharply reducing “where is my order?” queries to support. Real-time, contextual alerts fire on SLA adherence and delayed shipments, and daily execution reports put critical KPIs in front of the leaders who act on them. Every autonomous decision stays governed by six mechanisms: explainability, traceability, evaluation, autonomy levels, execution sandbox, and human-in-the-loop override.
The Results
People
The hours once spent keying orders and chasing carriers now go to higher-value work.
- 25% less time on manual shipping tasks, across order creation, carrier lookups, and status checks.
- Warehouse associates who spent hours on carrier portals now manage exceptions and define the policies the agents run on.
- 10-20X faster ticket resolution for customer support, answering from one platform instead of a portal per carrier.
Resource
Fulfillment got 33% faster on the same carrier network, once orchestration replaced manual coordination.
- Every order ships with the most reliable carrier for its destination, chosen on the team's policies and live data.
- Delays trigger alerts the moment SLAs slip, turning visibility into same-day intervention.
- The carrier network can grow without new integration work: 1,000+ carriers come pre-integrated on the Locus platform.
Cost
Lower cost to fulfill, and customers ordering more often.
- 15% reduction in fulfillment costs, with the best-rate carrier selected on every order.
- 10% increase in order frequency, as faster, more reliable delivery brought customers back sooner.
Impactful Enterprise Stories: 360+ and Expanding
$1M+ in savings for a North American retailer's multimodal, ocean-to-store network
3X ROI for a global FMCG leader across 10 countries
$14M+ unused capacity uncovered for a Fortune 50 parcel leader in North America
75% growth in clinician visit capacity for a leading US home care provider
Know More About LOCUS Services?
Schedule a demo with one of our industry experts