HansaMatrix has twenty-five years' experience in manufacturing electronics. The company operates across three locations, including two major manufacturing facilities in Ogre and Ventspils that provide Electronics Manufacturing Services (EMS), as well as a smaller manufacturing site and the company's headquarters in Marupe. Its customer base is mostly in Europe, with Scandinavia as a major market. It also ships to the United States.
The product range is broad. HansaMatrix builds everything from bare circuit boards shipped onward for assembly elsewhere to complete finished devices. Its clients include well-known brands such as Catchbox and MikroTik, as well as fast-growing Latvian companies like HackMotion, whose golf sensors are primarily aimed at the US market, and SAF Tehnika. HansaMatrix buys a large proportion of its materials from Asia. Outbound shipments mostly go across Europe.
Karina is the Warehouse and Logistics manager at HansaMatrix Ventspils, a manufacturing facility. This role used to spend far more time chasing carrier quotes than she would have liked.
The problem: five emails and a website form for every single quote
Before Cargoson, getting a shipment quoted and booked meant working almost entirely through email. For a single purchase order, Karina would need to send at least five separate emails, one to each carrier under consideration. Each carrier would then come back with their own follow-up questions. "That doubled my workload," she says, "because I was responsible for the price request."
For carriers without an existing relationship, especially for air and sea freight, there was no shortcut. Each one required HansaMatrix to complete the relevant carrier’s web form (TNT, FedEx, DPD, etc.) from scratch just to receive a quote. Sometimes, the form data was saved for later use. But often it was not. If HansaMatrix selected a different carrier to the one initially quoted, the whole process had to start again.
The real cost was time.
"Time is the most valuable resource in my department. That means I was spending it on things that added no value at all."
Booking also required a separate approval step. A price had to be captured, usually as a screenshot, sent for sign-off, and then more questions would arise: could it ship a day later for a better rate, and so on. Requests could slip through the cracks entirely. "There were cases where I would simply forget to reply, and they would have to remind me again," Karina says. "It was stressful and time-consuming."
HansaMatrix operates on a tight schedule all year round. Unlike many manufacturers, there is no significant summer downtime aside from a two-week factory shutdown. This meant that eliminating hours lost to manual carrier administration was important.
Finding Cargoson: the right call at the right time
Karina had already started researching the market herself and searching online for a better way to manage carrier quotes when Janis from Cargoson got in touch. The timing was more important than she had initially expected. "If you had called me a year earlier, I doubt I would have agreed," she says. "Order volumes were not pressing an issue yet. But this came at the right moment."
Although HansaMatrix's Ventspils manufacturing facility is strategically located close to Baltic transit routes and port infrastructure, this has had little direct impact on carrier sourcing itself since HansaMatrix does not handle freight consolidation in-house and has kept the same core transport partners. What has changed is visibility: more carriers now approach HansaMatrix directly because they know the company is sourcing through Cargoson.
What changed day to day: control, speed, and a system that remembers everything
Asked to rank the factors that delivered the highest value after implementation, Karina is clear: delivery and booking speed come first, control comes second, and price comes third, mainly because there is no earlier baseline against which to compare it.
Two things in particular stood out as more valuable than she had expected.
The first is the address book. HansaMatrix had already compiled its own list of shippers and recipients across its supply chain. Having that list in Cargoson meant that requests could be made in just a few clicks, rather than having to retype them every time. "The address is right there. You just type in the name and everything is filled in," says Karina.
The second is carrier response time, which is tracked directly inside Cargoson and is now reviewed by Karina in her monthly summaries. "I push all our carriers on that. They need to be responsive. If we need something now, we need it immediately. A reply after eighteen or twenty hours does not work for me." When prices are similar across carriers, response speed becomes the deciding factor. A faster reply means the shipment can be dispatched the same day instead of being put on hold.
Karina also uses the question itself as a signal.
"When carriers call, I quickly ask them, ‘Are you on Cargoson?’ For me, that is an indicator that a carrier understands industry trends and knows that integrations and communication cannot stay stuck in email forever."
CO2 data has also become part of the picture, ahead of an upcoming move towards ISO certification that will require it. "We already present CO2 data in our audits," Karina says. "We open the tool and show the data, so auditors can see that we have control."
Communication with carriers: the same relationship, sharper accountability
Cargoson has not replaced the relationship that HansaMatrix has with its carriers, and day-to-day communication still largely runs through Karina. Confirming a price or approving a shipment now takes her about thirty seconds, instead of the time-consuming process it used to be. What has changed is that carriers now know there is a visible standard to meet and a record of whether they have met it. On the rare occasions when a promised collection or delivery is missed, the conversation is straightforward. Carriers are generally quick to arrange a solution, be it a same-day collection or a price adjustment.
The measurable impact: time, not price
The most important benefit is having more time, and deciding how to spend it. Booking, which used to take up roughly two hours, now only takes about half an hour. This frees up to do more in-depth work in the warehouse, logistics and customs, which used to get pushed aside.
The alternative to using a tool like Cargoson would be to hire another person. A new logistics hire would typically take three to four months to become fully capable. HansaMatrix reached a comparable level of structure in about six weeks. "We can measure efficiency and whether we are spending that time effectively," she says. "And I can see that it reduces stress for the person doing the job." The day-to-day process is also easier to audit: instead of digging back through old email threads to work out who replied to what, Karina can see at a glance which quotes are still outstanding and which have been dealt with.
Who benefits most from this
When asked which companies would benefit most from a system like Cargoson, Karina identified two groups: businesses that use several carriers, for which price is important and achieving the right balance between price and delivery time is a constant challenge, and companies working towards ISO certification, for which manually pulling CO2 data from ten different carriers quickly becomes unmanageable.
HansaMatrix did not set out to overhaul its carrier relationships. What the company needed was a way to stop losing hours to email chains and website forms every time a shipment required a quote. A well-timed call resulted in the creation of a system that freed up a significant amount of time for the logistics team, made carrier performance visible and trackable, and put HansaMatrix in a stronger position for the upcoming CO2 reporting requirements.
As Karina puts it, the biggest win cannot be put on the balance sheet:
"It's time. That was our goal from the start."
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