Cut quote turnaround from 3 days to 11 minutes
A freight broker was losing tenders to faster competitors. Not on price — on the three days it took to get a number back to the customer.
The problem
Inbound RFQs arrived as email, most of them unstructured and many as attachments. An ops coordinator re-keyed each one into a spreadsheet, checked rate cards across two systems, phoned a depot to confirm capacity, then wrote the quote by hand. Volume had tripled in two years; headcount had not.
What we built
- An extraction agent that reads the inbound email and any attachment, and pulls out lane, weight, dates and special handling into a structured record.
- A pricing step that queries the existing rate cards and the capacity system directly, rather than through a person.
- A drafted quote surfaced in their CRM with the reasoning shown, for a human to approve or amend in one click.
- A confidence threshold — anything unusual is escalated rather than guessed at, which is what kept the error rate down.
What we would do differently
We spent three weeks on attachment parsing before discovering that 80% of the awkward cases came from two customers who could simply be asked to use a form. Cheaper fix, found too late.
"We'd tried automation twice before and both attempts rotted within a month. Mindspace built the boring parts properly — logging, retries, alerts — so it's still running a year later."
Leif ElgethumFounder & CEO, Retrolux
