A mid-market logistics team was running complex billing out of a single, chaotic shared inbox. Rigby by Viberr turned 94,000+ emails into a structured, automated triage system, without ever disrupting the daily work happening inside it.
Mid-market logistics and 3PL operations rarely fail for lack of effort. They fail because the system of record for complex billing is often a shared email inbox, a stack of spreadsheets, and the institutional memory of a few key people. Legacy TMS platforms handle routing and tracking, but were never built for complex invoice reconciliation, and enterprise AP suites cost upwards of $100K and take 12 to 18 months to implement.
That gap has a cost. Across the mid-market, operations teams spend an estimated 15 to 25 hours per week on manual invoice processing, and companies lose an estimated 30% of recoverable revenue to uncaptured change orders, unbilled accessorial charges, and paperwork delays.
For this 3PL, the pressure point was the AR shared inbox: the place where carrier confirmations, invoice exceptions, remittances, proof-of-delivery documents, and pure noise all landed together. You cannot automate, or even trust, a process you cannot see. Phase 1 existed to fix exactly that.
Rigby replaces the standard software-deployment model with a three-step approach: embed, automate, compound. Human judgment first, automation second.
An operations specialist and an engineer embed with the customer's team for roughly 20 hours a week over 90 days, mapping workflows, documenting exception rules, and capturing the tribal knowledge required to process invoices correctly.
That captured knowledge is encoded into AI agents that ingest multiple formats (PDF, email, EDI, CSV, images), match line items against rate cards and contracts, flag discrepancies, link proof-of-delivery documents, and orchestrate outgoing invoices.
Once workflows are automated, the customer moves to an ongoing SaaS subscription. Every automated workflow becomes a reusable pattern, so a freight agent trained on one 3PL deploys to the next much faster.
The team resisted the temptation to treat 94,000 emails as a sorting problem to be brute-forced. Instead, they treated it as an operational audit, understanding the data before designing any structure.
Analyze mailbox structure, review folder usage, identify communication types, and find patterns in how emails were referenced.
Sort each type into functional groups: active work, reference material, financial documentation, or spam.
Build routing and folders around how work actually moves, not how it looks from the outside.
The most useful surprise came from the volume breakdown. A large share of the mailbox, tied to invoice requests and historical documentation, looked operationally urgent but was actually archival. Separating that record-keeping mass from the small percentage of communications that genuinely needed action became the project's organizing principle.
The highest-risk information in any operations team is the rule that isn't written down anywhere. A dedicated remittance folder for one key carrier looked, from the outside, like any other financial communication, but it carried specific handling and storage requirements that existed only in the day-to-day operator's institutional knowledge. An automated system left to its own logic could easily have routed it wrong.
Surfacing those rules took deliberate work. The engineering side built logic to hunt for inconsistencies, emails that looked similar but were handled differently, and every mismatch became a question: why? The answers revealed customer-specific processes, carrier-specific requirements, and historical practices that no procedure document had ever captured.
Changing the sorting on a live, working inbox is high-stakes. The team still had to process real invoices every day while the structure changed underneath them. Rigby's rule was simple: operational improvement should never create operational risk. Changes were introduced incrementally, validated continuously, and reviewed with the team before becoming permanent.
There were bumps: visibility issues, a caching problem, emails that appeared to be missing. Rather than forcing adoption through them, the team treated each one as a chance to validate assumptions and strengthen the process, working alongside the operator until confidence was restored. That willingness to absorb the messiness is exactly what a typical SaaS rollout can't do, and it's the reason the structure held.
Phase 1's hard proof is the transformation itself: an inbox of more than 94,000 emails became a structured environment with documented workflows, validated routing logic, and clearly defined ownership. Just as importantly, the team gained something they never had: visibility into which communications require action versus which represent historical records.
That foundation is also what makes the next phase possible. Proof-of-delivery validation, Phase 2, depends on a documented, agreed process to test against. As Alicia put it, without the Phase 1 foundation, "POD validation would be evaluating chaos rather than a process."
A significant portion of what Rigby built here transfers directly to the next 3PL. The methodology, audit framework, discovery process, workflow-documentation approach, and categorization logic are reusable. What changes each time are the client-specific rules, relationships, and exceptions.
For a near-identical 3PL, Phase 1 could stand up significantly faster. The templates, audit methodology, and onboarding structure already exist. The team would still uncover client-specific workflows, but never from a blank page. That is the compounding advantage: every engagement makes the next one quicker.
By documenting workflows, validating ownership, identifying exceptions, and establishing routing standards, Phase 1 created the conditions Phase 2 needs. Rigby has already validated that PODs can be reliably confirmed or flagged. The next step is applying that logic to a notification system. Before Phase 2 accelerates, three things must be true: access and permissions fully established, routing and ownership rules documented and agreed, and stakeholder confidence that the underlying workflow reflects how the business truly operates.
The step-by-step method behind the rebuild.
SolutionTurn a shared inbox into a structured queue with documents captured and routed.
IndustryWhere complex billing lives, and how Rigby is rebuilding it.
Rigby by Viberr is AI-native invoicing built for the complexity gap in mid-market logistics, 3PL, and freight. Start with a 15-minute discovery call to map your revenue leakage.