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Dimi Kurtti

Freight Audit: What the Industry Isn't Talking About

"You have to know the work to be able to build the product." — Dimi Kurtti

Freight audit is changing, and there are parts of the industry that still don't get enough attention. In a recent Trax discussion, Dimi Kurtti, Senior Director of Product Strategy at Trax, talked through the operational blind spots vendors don't like to admit, why she thinks diverse perspectives are missing from supply chain leadership, and the assumption she'd challenge if she wrote the freight audit industry's next opinion piece.

What This Conversation Covers

Dimi's answers move across three threads: how genuinely difficult it is to serve customers across every mode, region and invoice format at once, what she brings to product decisions after building her career from the operations side up, and how her team rebuilt a sixty-day carrier onboarding process by automating it one step at a time instead of chasing a single big AI overhaul.

 

Resources

Full Transcript

Host: Hi everyone, and welcome to the Trax channel. Today I'm here with Dimi Kurtti. Hi Dimi, how are you?

Dimi Kurtti: Hi Faith, I'm great. Thanks for having me. How are you?

Host: Good. It was so funny, this morning I thought, "Wait, is it Thursday? No, it's Wednesday." These short weeks throw me off completely.

Dimi Kurtti: I know.

Host: My kids keep asking if we're going to school tomorrow, and I'm like, yes, I think so. We lost a day somewhere in there, but we're back on track. Enjoyed a nice long weekend and a four-day work week.

Host: So today we're talking about freight audits, supply chain leadership and some assumptions the industry may need to rethink. First question: what's the part of working with freight audit customers that most vendors don't want to talk about, because it's difficult or expensive to do well?

Dimi Kurtti: I think the most difficult thing in the industry, and the thing that doesn't come out very well from other providers, is global positioning. Most freight auditors really cater to a region, a country or a mode: parcel, LTL. There are very few providers, and it's extremely difficult to actually deliver on being a multimodal, global provider. We have to understand tax requirements in every region. We handle international payments. We support every format of invoicing: EDI, XML, paper, whatever the carriers produce. And we do this for every single mode. It exponentially expands the amount of knowledge and time you're investing into these clients.

Host: What perspective do you bring to product decisions that you think more people in the industry should hear?

Dimi Kurtti: The interesting thing is I came into product not because I had experience in product. I came into it because I've been in this industry since college. I worked for a Trax customer, then came to Trax, worked in operations, worked side by side with the people doing the roles, and spent time on our solutions team. Then I was asked to move into product to help build out what our future product vision should look like. Coming into this role a couple of years ago, I had to learn product, and that's been an amazing journey. Then this year I got to learn it all over again, because now traditional product management isn't cutting it. You have to incorporate AI. You have to figure out how to restructure your organization. It's a weird time to be in product right now. It's a great time to be in product. It's also a very confusing time to be in product.

What I bring, though, is that I still hold true to the belief that you have to know the work to be able to build the product. Through my years in this industry, I've built a lot of contacts and worked with people across every part of the industry, and I can bring that together as a knowledge of what this industry should be and what it can be. The other thing I think I bring, specifically as a female in an industry where there aren't many female leaders, is that method of collaboration: not dictating where we're going to go, but getting people involved, getting people to help define their own journeys, and getting everyone to come together toward one destination. That's the best part about my job.

Host: I love that. Great answer. Last question: if you were to write an opinion piece tomorrow that pushed back on something the freight audit industry takes for granted, what would it be?

Dimi Kurtti: That's a bit of a tough one. I always want to focus on the data. I really do still believe data is the most important thing about freight audit. If you'd asked me a year ago, I would have been all about the data. But now I think we have to shift that a little, because what people expect is the fun, interactive AI tools. So we've had to relearn how we're building product and try different things to figure out the best way to deliver what customers want.

Jason Westergard, my manager, is the visionary, and I'm responsible for delivering on it. We're bringing AI into the product in a different way than people might expect. We're not focused on the shiny front-end button that says "how can I help you today." We'll have that kind of thing, but that's not where we're putting AI. We have two fully AI products. One is AI Extractor, which is a data entry replacement that uses AI computer vision to ingest paper invoices. The other, which I want to talk about more, is Transport AI.

In our onboarding process, the traditional approach is you go to one carrier at a time, get example files, rework with the carrier until you get a file that meets our requirements, and then you can audit that invoice. That process can take about sixty days per carrier. We were given a very tight timeline by our CEO to improve that. So we sat down with operations, with every single person in the role, and asked what they were doing step by step. I thought I knew the process well, but when you sit with the person actually doing the work, you find out no one fully knows the process end to end.

We did that for every person and every step, and started using AI to automate one small thing at a time. Take one piece, use AI to build a tool for it, then take the next piece and do the same. We built Transport AI using that methodology in about six weeks. Today, it takes all of the carrier invoices for a new client, across multiple carriers and multiple submission types, and analyzes thousands of invoices at once instead of one or ten at a time. It gives you an output that says where the carrier needs to change, what you need to configure to make that carrier load in the system, what EDI specification they're using, and how to map that carrier. It does all of that in bulk. That process, using AI to do one thing at a time, would be my opinion piece on why it worked.

Host: That's so interesting. We should do an entire episode on that, because I'm obsessed with how continuing education, especially for professionals, some people are fighting against it and you're embracing it. It's fascinating. It was great to talk to you today, Dimi. We'll definitely have you back for more episodes.

Dimi Kurtti: Thank you so much. Bye.

Watch More From Trax

For more conversations like this one, subscribe to the Trax Technologies YouTube channel or follow Trax on LinkedIn for the next Freight Foresight discussion.

AI in the Supply Chain