Local Accounts, Group Visibility: How Cargoson TMS Works for Manufacturing and Wholesale Company Groups

Do you know how many shipments the entire group sent last month?

Each subsidiary tracks its own freight. One factory books LTL via email, the factory in another country uses two carrier portals and a warehouse in a different country stores FTL quotes in a spreadsheet that only one person fully understands. While each piece works on its own, they never add up to a group view when put together.

This article explains how Cargoson TMS helps company groups manage their supply chain and multi-carrier freight, with separate accounts for each company and one system for the whole group.

The problem with running transport across a group

When working with international manufacturing and wholesale groups, I often see the same challenge: each subsidiary has its own carriers, contracts and ways of working. The goal shouldn’t be to force everyone into the same process. It’s to give local teams the freedom to work with their preferred carriers while giving group management visibility and control across the entire organisation

- Tanel Vaarmann, Co-founder & CCO, Cargoson

Few company groups design their transport setup from scratch. They inherit it, one company at a time.

For example, a subsidiary acquired five years ago came with its own forwarder contract. The new factory in Norway selected a local parcel carrier because the country manager knew the account representative. Meanwhile, the main factory runs an annual LTL tender in euros, while the US branch pays in dollars and weighs everything in pounds.

Each decision made sense locally. At group level, the result usually looks like this:

• Separate tools: One company uses carrier portals, another uses its ERP shipping module and a third uses email.
• Spreadsheets to fill the gap: Someone at the head office collects monthly exports and tries to match carrier names that are spelled four different ways.
• Email as system of record: Quotes, pick-up confirmations and delay notices are stored in personal inboxes.
• No shared view: Simple questions take days to answer. For example, how much did the group spend with DHL last quarter? Which lanes run late most often? Are two subsidiaries paying different rates to the same carrier for the same route?

The usual solution is to centralize everything: one tool, one carrier list and one process, all set by head office. This rarely survives contact with local teams. For example, a logistics coordinator in a single country knows which carriers show up on a certain day, but a central template does not.

Case study example: AVK Group, a Danish valve manufacturer with more than 100 companies, ran into a version of this. Its shared email inbox for air freight inquiries worked well until 25 companies and 70 users depended on it, and then it couldn't keep up.

So the better question is how to keep local control and still see the whole group.

One software, separate local accounts

In Cargoson, each subsidiary and branch gets its own Cargoson account. For example, the factory in one country has one, as do the factory and warehouse in other countries. All of these accounts run on the same transport management system.

This separation is important for daily operations. Each local team books shipments, compares carrier prices, prints labels and tracks deliveries for their respective companies. Their screen shows their shipments, carriers and address book and nothing else.

This also reflects how most groups manage their finances. Each legal entity usually records its own profits and losses and pays its own freight invoices. Therefore, having a separate account for each company keeps transport costs where they belong.

The head office benefits from consistency. Every company records shipments in the same system and fields, meaning that numbers from different countries have the same meaning.

Local, regional and global carriers

The best pallet carrier in the Baltic region is rarely the best in the Benelux region. A group's carrier mix should reflect this.

Each Cargoson account uses carriers that fit its own market. One group's setup might look like this:

Global contracts can be held in several accounts simultaneously, while local carriers can remain where they are useful. For example, when the German team adds a new regional carrier, nobody in Estonia needs to be aware of this.

Note: Cargoson has over 2,000 direct carrier API connections. If a subsidiary works with a carrier that isn't yet connected, Cargoson will build the integration on request.

There is a group-level benefit, too. Since every account records shipments in the same way, the head office can see combined volumes per carrier across companies. AVK plans to use this in carrier negotiations by approaching forwarders with combined volumes from five countries instead of one.

Price lists, contacts and integrations for each account

Each group company keeps three things in its own account:

• Carrier price lists: The Estonian factory's FTL rates to Scandinavia and the German factory's parcel rates are separate, each with their own surcharges, fuel adjustments, and dates of validity. Teams send rate cards in whatever format they have (Excel, PDF or email), and Cargoson digitises them.
• Contacts: Customer, supplier, delivery address and carrier contact details are stored in the address book of the company that uses them.
• Integrations: One subsidiary connects Cargoson to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, another to NetSuite and a third to SAP. Each account has its own ERP connection.

The practical effect is that changes remain localised. For example, when one country's team closes its January LTL tender and uploads new price lists, the price comparisons of another country's team don't change. When the US branch replaces its ERP system, European companies continue to book as they did the day before.

This independence also makes rollouts easier. A new acquisition can implement its own carriers and rates without having to wait for a group-wide project.

Local settings: language, currency and units

Each Cargoson account is set up in a way that reflects the way its own team already works.

• 26 languages: A warehouse worker in Estonia and a controller in Germany work in different languages. The same system and data are used, but with a different interface language.
• Multiple currencies: The Swedish company sees freight prices in SEK, the Estonian company in EUR and the US branch in USD.
• Metric and imperial units: The US team enters weights in pounds and dimensions in inches. The European teams use kilograms and centimetres.

This is especially important in places that the head office cannot easily reach. AVK's users are located in China, India, Canada, Spain and Saudi Arabia. They have very different backgrounds and levels of technical skill. The group chose Cargoson partly because new users could find their way around after a single walkthrough.

As Agnieszka Skrzypińska, Global Category Freight Manager of AVK, puts it: "It's an easy system. Nothing overcomplicated. You can show it one time to a person, and the person is able to navigate it by themselves."

Global user access

Users with global access can switch between accounts belonging to different group companies. They can switch from the Estonian to the German entity and back with one login.

Local users can only see their own company's account. Global access is intended for people whose job spans several companies.

• Group logistics managers follow costs, carrier performance and open shipments across subsidiaries.
• Central freight procurement teams set up carriers and upload group contracts, while local teams handle bookings. At AVK, the central team selects and manages forwarders by region. End users can then simply compare prices and lead times before booking.
• Regional supply chain leads help a subsidiary with unusual shipments, such as oversized machines or dangerous goods consignments.

Global access also solves the less obvious problem of key-person risk. At a small subsidiary, the logistics coordinator is often the only person who books freight. If that person goes on holiday, someone with global access can log in to the account and arrange bookings with the same carriers and at the same prices as the local team. There is no need for shared passwords or handover spreadsheets.

Shipment and order visibility within the group

Separate accounts do not mean working in isolation. The group decides which of its accounts can see which shipments and orders, and which data within them.

This level of control is important because group companies rarely want to share everything. Here are a few typical setups:

• Factory to factory. The factory in one country can see the factory's outbound shipments to its warehouse, including their status and expected delivery date. This means that customers' queries can be answered without having to call the factory.
• They share status information, not prices. A subsidiary can share tracking information with sister companies, but keeps its negotiated freight rates inside its own account.
• It's fully separate. Two factories in different countries that never ship to each other don't see each other's customer shipments at all.

Companies only share what is needed: Sales teams receive delivery dates, the local logistics teams keep their carrier deals to themselves, and the head office, with its global access, sees the full picture.

Intercompany shipments

Shipments between group companies are where the impact of using different tools is felt most strongly. For example, one factory books the truck, another one follows up on the arrival date via email, and the finance department then wonders which entity the carrier should invoice.

With Cargoson, this is handled by our Cross-Domain Visibility. When both the sender and the receiver use Cargoson, shared shipments appear automatically in both accounts. Both teams see the same status and milestones. Freight prices remain private to the company that booked and paid for them.

Here's an example: A metal products factory in Estonia ships six pallets of finished goods to the group's warehouse in Sweden.

The factory books once, Sweden follows the same shipment in its own account, and the head office counts it once.

1. The order arrives. The Swedish warehouse places a purchase order with the factory. The factory's ERP system converts this into a delivery order and sends shipment data (including address, number of pallets, weights and dimensions) to the Cargoson account.
2. The factory books the shipment. The logistics team then compares prices and transit times from its own carriers to Sweden, selecting the option that meets the delivery date before booking it. The labels and the CMR are generated from the same booking.
3. Sweden can then see the shipment coming. As these shipments are shared by the group, the Swedish account shows the delivery as incoming with a tracking status and an expected arrival time. The warehouse plans the receiving process without exchanging a single email.
4. The correct company pays. Each shipment records which group company is paying for the transport, meaning the carrier can invoice the correct entity. AVK uses a mandatory field for this exact purpose, as each of its companies is responsible for its own profit and loss.
5. Head office sees one shipment. Group reporting counts it once instead of once in the factory's data and again in the warehouse's spreadsheet.

The reverse process works in the same way. When the Swedish warehouse returns a damaged pallet, it arranges the return shipment via its own account and carriers, and the factory can see it coming.

Who this is for

This setup is ideal for a medium-sized manufacturing or wholesale group with subsidiaries in several countries, where local teams arrange their own transport and the head office requires better visibility.

Typically, that equates to:

• Group turnover of around €50m to €500m, spread across factories, warehouses, and countries.
• There are 500 to 5,000 shipments per month across the group, comprising a mix of parcels, pallets, LTL and FTL.
• Each company has an ERP system, which is sometimes the same one and sometimes different (SAP, Microsoft Dynamics 365, NetSuite or Odoo).
• There are also existing carrier contracts that local teams want to keep.

If the group is a single company that ships parcels to consumers, this setup exceeds its needs. But if it's three factories in three different countries, each of which books its own trucks, it's built for exactly that.

Start with one company

Most groups don't move all their subsidiaries at once, nor do they need to. AVK started with Belgium, which required a multi-carrier system for distribution purposes. This was followed by a new distribution flow in the UK, then two Spanish companies. The group-wide rollout is now underway.

As each account is set up with a company's own carriers and price lists, there is no need for one company to wait for another. Most manufacturers go live within two weeks.

Managing transport across multiple subsidiaries?

I’m Tanel Vaarmann, Co-founder and CCO of Cargoson. I work directly with international manufacturing and wholesale groups to help them manage transport across different countries, companies and carriers.

If you’re exploring how to improve group-wide transport visibility without taking away local control, I’d be happy to discuss your current setup and show you how other groups approach this with Cargoson TMS.

Book a free 30-minute consultation with me