Overview

ShipSmarter is a full-service third-party logistics provider, running order fulfillment and warehousing out of its facility in Indianapolis for DTC and B2B brands.

ShipSmarter turned to Neo to go after the biggest line items on a 3PL’s P&L — the cost that ran the floor and the carrier spend that quietly eroded margin — and turned the manual work behind them into intelligence they can act on.

With Neo, ShipSmarter put its repetitive operational work on autopilot and gave the team back the capacity to grow. Within thirty days, three use cases were live in production: bulk ship label printing automation, customer-level forecasting intelligence, and post-shipment support automation. Their operation has fundamentally changed, and they’re just getting started.

The Challenge

3PLs compete in a margin-compressed environment. Pricing pressure is constant, labor is expensive, service quality matters more than ever before, and cash flow tightens fast. Most operators like ShipSmarter are not short of demand, but don’t have the operational headroom to take it on.

The challenge is not about the hours per day spent in dashboards or spreadsheets — it’s about what those hours represent: a ceiling on growth.

At ShipSmarter, the ceiling showed up as:

• Key operators stuck pulling reports and reconciling carrier invoices instead of onboarding new customers

• An ever-growing list of repetitive, manual work that is solved only by adding more people or hours

• No daily forward view of order mix, labor needs, or margin by customer

• New business turned down, because the operation was not optimized to scale

The deepest cost wasn’t the hours — it was the founder’s attention. Cody and his team spent days inside the operation, firefighting exceptions and pulling reports, with no room to step back and work on strategically growing his business: new accounts, business optimization, or the next facility.

ShipSmarter had already tried alternatives. Traditional 3PL software promised AI results but never bridged the visibility gap between systems. General-purpose AI assistants could talk about logistics in the abstract but had no context on the nuances of 3PLs.

“I asked ChatGPT each day for the last week to provide me correct addresses for orders with address holds. Today I asked Neo, and the orders are already ready to ship. It’s smarter than ChatGPT.”

Cody Branham

Founder, ShipSmarter

The Solution

Neo is the AI operating layer for light industrial operators — it removes the structural bottlenecks so ShipSmarter can scale without hurting margins or service quality. Within thirty days, three use cases were live in production.

• Bulk Ship Label Printing Automation: Customer order intake to label and routing decisions, executed without manual touch. The AI agent reads incoming orders, generates labels, and dispatches to the floor.

• Customer-Level Forecasting Intelligence: Per-customer margin and capacity visibility, refreshed daily from ShipSmarter’s existing data. Operators answer “what will this account need next week?” in real time.

• Post-Shipment Support Automation: Customer reconciliation and exception handling, driven by AI agents. Discrepancies caught and resolved daily; Neo escalates when human intervention is needed.

The Result

In its first month on Neo, ShipSmarter measurably changed what their operation could absorb.

• 20% administrative labor cost reduction

• 8 hours/week of time reclaimed for each member of the leadership team

• 90% reduction in administrative errors

• 99% of bulk shipping orders automated end-to-end

• 90% of post-shipment exceptions resolved without human touch

The qualitative shift was just as significant. Cody’s team got time back for the work that actually moves the business — growing existing accounts, optimizing workflows, and taking on new business.

The bigger unlock was how Neo handled what it hadn’t seen before. When new products introduced order types Neo had never encountered, Neo flagged the gap and asked how to handle it, the way you'd onboard a new hire. ShipSmarter taught it in plain language, and Neo learned and adapted in real time.

Today, every order that leaves the facility has a plan. Neo tracks each shipment to delivery, and when something needs intervention, it reaches out to the carrier before it becomes a customer problem.

“I used to spend my entire mornings catching up on carrier exceptions and ensuring our bulk ship packing teams had work to do throughout the day. Now Neo's already handled all of this before I even step foot into the office.”

Kyle Strudwick

Senior Operations Manager, ShipSmarter

What’s Next

Once the ShipSmarter team recognized Neo’s capabilities, they immediately started working with Traba on the next round of automations and intelligence — carrier claims, billings reconciliation, labor forecasting, co-picking analysis, and more. Each one compounds on the data, context, and knowledge already embedded in Neo.

“Neo is two things I didn’t know I needed in one: the calm in the storm that takes manual work off my team, and the eye in the sky that watches my operation, gets ahead of problems, and surfaces things I missed. With Neo, I can now scale my business profitably with confidence.”

Cody Branham

Founder, ShipSmarter