Atlas Freight
A freight forwarder whose sales team spent half their day copying numbers between spreadsheets and email.
The sales team was the bottleneck, not the shipping.
Atlas had grown quickly, but the quoting process had not kept up. Every request came in by email, was priced manually in a spreadsheet, and went back out by email. A simple quote took half a day; a complex one could take two.
Customers were waiting. Some stopped waiting. The team knew the problem but did not have the time to fix it while also doing the work.
We built a tool that does the copying so the team can do the thinking.
We mapped the quoting process end to end, identified the steps that were pure data entry, and built a platform that handles those steps automatically. The sales team still makes the pricing decisions, they just make them faster.
Shadow the process
We sat with the team and timed every step.
Automate the repetition
Data entry, lookups and formatting, handled by the platform.
Keep the judgement human
Pricing decisions stay with the people who know the market.
Roll out in stages
One route first, then the rest, so the team adjusted gradually.
“Our team got their afternoons back. That alone was worth it.”