Meridian Freight
Logistics
How Meridian Freight cut exception handling from six hours to eleven minutes
Meridian’s coordinators spent their days chasing carriers. An Exception Handler agent now detects delays, chooses the recovery play and keeps customers informed — around the clock.
97%
exceptions resolved autonomously
11 min
median time to resolution
$2.4M
annual cost avoided
AT A GLANCE
HEADQUARTERS
Rotterdam, NL
COMPANY SIZE
3,400 employees
TEAM
Operations · 60 coordinators
AGENTS DEPLOYED
THE CHALLENGE
Meridian moves 40,000 shipments a week across Europe. Roughly one in twenty hits an exception: a missed pickup, a failed delivery, a customs hold. Each one meant a coordinator reading carrier portals, emailing three parties and updating the customer by hand.
On a bad week the backlog reached 900 open exceptions, and the median resolution time was just over six hours. Customers noticed before Meridian did.
THE SOLUTION
Meridian started with a single lane — Rotterdam to Lyon — and ran an Exception Handler agent in shadow mode for two weeks. The agent proposed a recovery play for every exception; coordinators approved or corrected it, and each correction became an eval case.
Once agreement passed 95%, autonomy was switched on for re-ships under €500 and address corrections. Anything else still goes to a coordinator, with the research already done.
Carrier events stream into Cairn as triggers
Read-only Snowflake access for order value and customer history
Approval gates for re-ships above €500
Daily digest of every autonomous decision to #ops-exceptions
THE RESULTS
Within ten weeks the agent handled 97% of exceptions end to end. Median resolution fell from six hours to eleven minutes, and the coordinators who used to chase carriers now run supplier performance reviews.
Meridian estimates $2.4M a year in avoided re-delivery costs and credits, and late-delivery complaints are down 61%.
