Partner with FreedomDev, a trusted business consulting company in Detroit, to overcome challenges and achieve your business goals in the Motor City.
FreedomDev is based in West Michigan and works with clients remotely across the United States.
Detroit is the only U.S. city where three Class-A railroads (CSX, Norfolk Southern, Canadian National) converge inside a seven-mile radius. That density of infrastructure creates a $13.8 B freight market—and a maze of regulatory, labor, and data challenges for manufacturers, 3PLs, and auto suppliers.
We do not arrive with canned playbooks. Every engagement starts with a structured diagnostic that pulls financial, operational, and technical data into a single data warehouse, giving us a factual baseline for identifying waste and building a roadmap toward cash-flow improvement.
Detroit’s talent cost curve is steeper than most markets for senior technical talent. Our West Michigan-based team lets you tap equivalent skill sets at lower cost while keeping stakeholders inside the same time zone.
We have guided private-equity portfolio companies through carve-outs, including ERP cut-over, customs-compliance re-mapping, and IT obsolescence planning.
Detroit's industrial corridors still run a lot of legacy SCADA layers and home-grown AS/400 modules. We've reverse-engineered legacy inventory files for stamping plants, converted them to modern databases, and integrated real-time feeds to production equipment, cutting scrap and unlocking working-capital improvements.
Detroit’s minority-owned business ecosystem is growing, but access to traditional SBA lending remains a challenge for many firms. We've built credit-risk tooling that pulls from commercial data sources to help lenders evaluate applicants more accurately.
We are vendor-agnostic in every recommendation we make.
Engagements are priced on outcome, not effort. For manufacturing transformation work, we structure a portion of our fee as at-risk and tied to the margin or throughput metrics the client cares most about.
Tell us what is happening, what systems are involved, and what you are trying to improve. We'll help determine a practical next step.
We import public waybill data and overlay it with your shipment files to create a lane-by-lane cost model that shows what each customer really costs after drayage, demurrage, and border-crossing fees. Clients use this to identify shipments that need re-pricing.
Our pre-built templates map APQP deliverables to your PLM, MES, and QMS so that PPAP packets auto-assemble 40 % faster.
We deploy MQTT gateways on legacy CNC machines, stream data to Azure, and apply anomaly-detection algorithms designed to give advance warning of spindle failure, helping plants avoid unplanned downtime.
UAW contracts often limit line-change windows tightly. We run dual-track agile: one track for user-facing features, one for factory-floor changes that must freeze during shift hand-off, minimizing disruption and overtime exposure.
We can build QOZ-related financial modeling that helps clients evaluate stacking Michigan Renaissance Zone credits with federal opportunity-zone benefits — this work should be coordinated with the client's own tax and legal counsel. We do not have a partnership with Miller Canfield.
We're saving 20 to 30 hours a week now. They took our ramblings and turned them into an actual product. Five stars across the board.
Migrate 20-year-old RPG code to Postgres without losing audit trails.
Free $600 k+ in working capital by right-sizing safety stock using STB rail data.
Predictive maintenance can meaningfully reduce unplanned downtime and the overtime costs that come with emergency repairs.
Carve-out consulting is designed to protect and improve exit valuation during PE portfolio transitions.
Stack state and federal zone credits for 32 % effective rate reduction on new facilities.
We pull general-ledger data, production schedules, and relevant labor agreements into a structured diagnostic that surfaces the constraints blocking cash flow — commonly forecast error, legacy code, or logistics misalignment. The output is a one-page heat map scored by expected impact.
Early in the engagement we run a small pilot that proves savings are real before committing to a larger rollout.
We layer operational initiatives with Michigan incentive programs, helping clients pursue MEDC grants in parallel with the project roadmap to help offset total project cost.
Features that touch the production line are frozen during shift hand-off; back-office features deploy continuously. Dual-track agile and feature flags let us work within tight union-mandated change windows while still releasing regularly.
We close the books every quarter using the same chart of accounts from the diagnostic. If at-risk metrics are missed, we cut our fee. If they are exceeded, we share the upside.
We embed two of your analysts in our sprint reviews and run a 6-week hand-off academy so your team can re-run the constraint model annually. Most clients renew for ad-hoc advisory rather than re-engage a full transformation team.
Detroit is one of the most logistics-dense metros in North America, with extensive rail, interstate, and cross-border freight infrastructure. That density lowers outbound cost per mile but raises complexity — a mis-timed rail slot can cascade into significant demurrage costs quickly.
Detroit's automotive suppliers commonly operate on thin margins, where expedited-freight costs can swing earnings meaningfully. In our experience, a large share of expedites stem from forecast bias rather than supplier failure, so we attack the demand signal first instead of adding safety stock.
Detroit has above-average industrial electricity rates. We build sub-metering and scheduling tools that help manufacturers shift production runs to off-peak windows, cutting power costs without capital expenditure. We do not have a client or vendor relationship with DTE Energy, and we have no facility in Grand Rapids.
Talent retention is difficult in Michigan's tight market for software engineers, and companies increasingly compete on mission as much as money. We help clients design equity and career-ladder structures aimed at improving retention.
Detroit’s land bank holds a large inventory of parcels, and choosing a site inside a Renaissance Zone with limited years remaining can mean losing a property-tax abatement sooner than expected. We can build GIS-based site-selection tools that layer parcel data, workforce commute times, and infrastructure age to help clients evaluate incentive runway.
Detroit's resurgence has drawn significant private development, much of it from outside Michigan. Out-of-state investors often miss local requirements like Detroit's skilled-trades local-hiring rules on larger projects. We build those constraints into capital-expenditure models so clients account for them upfront.
Detroit's airport cargo capacity is limited relative to demand, so shippers of time-sensitive freight need contingency routing plans. We can build routing-comparison models that help clients evaluate alternate airports when primary cargo capacity is constrained.
FreedomDev is based in West Michigan and works with clients remotely across the United States.
Talk with an experienced member of our team about your situation.
We code in Detroit, get paid in Detroit, and hire from Wayne State’s SE program. Yet we deploy the same Snowflake, Azure, and MLOps stacks used by Fortune 50 clients, giving you Tier-1 capability without coastal prices.
FreedomDev runs on the same KPIs we prescribe. Our internal EBIT margin improved 6.2 points after we applied our own cost-to-serve model to client engagements—proof the method works under the same labor, tax, and utility conditions you face.
Up to 25 % of our fee is at-risk and tied to EBITDA or cash-flow metrics you choose. When we've missed an agreed metric, we've reduced our invoice without the client having to ask.
We understand UAW labor-contract constraints and manufacturing-floor realities that dominate Detroit engagements, which reduces ramp-up time on projects. We do not have CMMC-certified defense-contracting experience to reference.
We treat state and federal incentives as part of the P&L, not a lottery ticket, and can help clients pursue Michigan Economic Development Corporation programs as part of a transformation's funding plan.
Explore all our software services in Detroit
Statewide trade association representing Michigan manufacturers on policy and advocacy.
Visit siteThe newly unified statewide BBB, formed from the 2026 merger of the former Western Michigan and Eastern Michigan/U.P. bureaus.
Visit siteFree business consulting and training through a statewide network of SBDC offices.
Visit siteTell us what is happening, what systems are involved, and what you are trying to improve in Detroit. We'll help determine a practical next step.