Listen
Sat with the desk through a live air quote and a live sea quote, writing down every figure it typed more than once.
D 1
FREIGHT ERPQUOTE TO INVOICE12 DAYS
The quote
that becomes
the invoice
A freight forwarder priced air and sea in spreadsheets, mailed them as PDFs, then retyped the accepted one into an invoice. Now every figure is entered once.
- CLIENT
- Confidential — freight forwarding
- SECTOR
- Freight forwarding & logistics
- SCOPE
- Architecture, build, deployment
- DURATION
- 12 days, brief to live
- TEAM
- 1 engineer
12→1d
SECOND FREIGHT MODE, TO LIVE
4→1
TOOLS THE DESK OPENS PER JOB
9.5k
PORTS + AIRPORTS, KEPT CURRENT
0
DOCUMENTS RE-KEYED PER JOB
THE BRIEF
Nothing was missing. Everything was retyped.
Two freight modes on one desk. Air prices per kilo against a flight, sea per container against a sailing. Quotes lived in Excel, rates in email, the accepted one was retyped into the ledger and the invoice retyped again.
The obvious fix was a general ERP with a freight add-on. Each one quoted asked the desk to price sea the way it prices air, or to run two products side by side. That asymmetry is the business — flattening it sells them their own workaround.
CONSTRAINTS
- Air prices per kilo, sea per container — neither mode could be bent to fit the other.
- The client owns their own copy and their own data. No shared tenancy, no per-seat licence.
- It has to work on a bad connection at a warehouse, not only in the office.
- Every AI feature had to be switchable off — not every buyer wants AI in the loop.
THE BUILD
Four phases. Twelve days.
Architect
Designed one quote that both modes share, so a price, a number or a rule is defined in exactly one place and every document reads it.
D 2Build
Shipped air, then sea, then the customer portal, proforma, tax invoice and carrier tracking that hang off an accepted quote.
D 3—10Operate
Put it live on the client's own server, with a dashboard over the whole desk and an assistant that can file an enquiry on request.
D 11 →WHAT WE SHIPPED
Air & sea quotation modules
Customer portal
Proforma & tax invoicing
Carrier tracking
An assistant that files enquiries
WHAT CHANGED FOR THE DESK
Quoting
Sending a quote
Invoicing
Where a job stands
Adding the next mode
THE OUTCOME
Four documents. One computation.
BEFORE / AFTER
Second freight mode, to live
12 days → 1 day
Places money is defined
3 → 1
Ports and airports kept by hand
9,490 → 0
Documents re-keyed per job
4 → 0
“Sea freight went live the day after air. The second mode was a day's work because the first one was built to expect it.”