How Berríos stopped losing its freight savings to demurrage.

About Berríos

Mueblerías Berríos is Puerto Rico’s leading home furnishings retailer and one of the largest Ashley Furniture retailers in the market, with 28 stores island-wide and more than 50 years serving Puerto Rican families. Behind that retail footprint sits a logistics operation of scale: the largest distribution center in Central America.

That logistics operation is where Nauta was deployed: ocean freight into the island, containers moving through port on a clock, and a team booking every shipment on the lowest available rate it could find.

The challenge: cheap rates, expensive outcomes

Since the monumental shifts in Asian shipping demand and the uncontrolled transportation surcharges triggered by the 2020 pandemic, Berríos operated on a spot-rate strategy: identify the lowest available tariff for every single shipment to keep transportation costs down.

But the execution behind that strategy was fragmented: bookings handled partly by hand, partly through an external coordinator, with no single platform compiling the data. Performance metrics were impossible to generate. Daily loads of shipments, emails, and scattered information translated into manual input work, wasted time, and a lack of preparation across operations.

A costly paradox

Even with the lowest rates secured, the savings were being lost to severe demurrage charges. The rate was won: the lowest available tariff, shipment by shipment. But the free-time clock was running at port, tracked nowhere in particular, and the penalties ate the difference the rate had won. Berríos recognized that to control cost and scale, they needed a system of action, not more manual effort.

What Nauta did: one source of truth

Nauta integrated Berríos’ internal and external logistics data into one source of truth: the operational brain to anticipate risk and act on it across their supply chains, so the team could finally see where savings were leaking and understand which booking terms actually generated savings.

With one source of truth in place, Berríos could see which service providers they used most, which origins carried the highest volume, which carriers generated the most demurrage charges, and their real receiving capacity.

Agents act. Humans decide.

A crew of agents now runs the routine so the team can focus on the decisions that matter:

• ETD and ETA changes: logistics users detect changes in sailing or reception dates before the supplier or carrier even notifies the delay, giving the team time to prepare instead of react.
• Demurrage and detention alerts: when a container is at port, Nauta flags Berríos before free time ends, so containers are returned on time without incurring penalties.
• Land pickup handoff on arrival: on container arrival, the pickup information is sent automatically to the land supplier, so shipments are received without manual coordination.

The results: the rates stayed low. Now the savings stay too.

With the clock visible on every container and the record complete on every carrier, the penalties came off the freight bill and the manual input work came off the team:

• $3M less spent on demurrage every year.
• 65% less manual work: over 32 monthly hours cut to roughly a third of that.
• 3 automations live, across sailing dates, free time, and the land pickup handoff.
• 1 source of truth: internal and external logistics data, integrated.

Nauta has helped Berríos centralize their entire operations in one place, optimizing efficiency.

Berríos went from chasing the lowest rate to keeping what the rate was worth.

Back to Home