How Northwind Freight cut quote time from six minutes to forty seconds

The problem

Northwind moves around 900 loads a week. Each one began with a dispatcher opening four windows: the rate sheet, the fuel table, the customer record, and a spreadsheet holding the margin rules. The quote was assembled by hand, and it took roughly six minutes when nothing went wrong.

Six minutes is long enough to lose the load. Brokers contact three carriers at once and accept the first quote returned. Northwind was not losing on price; it was losing on response time.

The approach

We consolidated the quote onto one screen and reduced the dispatcher's task to describing the load. Everything the four windows previously held is now read by the server as soon as the lane and the weight are known.

• One form, one result. The price updates as the load is described, so there is no submit step to wait on.
• Margin rules were moved from the spreadsheet into a service with test coverage, so a rule change is a reviewed code change.
• Every quote is stored alongside the rules that produced it, so a disputed figure can be explained months later.

Migrating eleven years of pricing rules

The rate sheet carried eleven years of exceptions. Some were documented. Most were held by two dispatchers who had been with the company throughout. We spent a week with both of them and recorded every exception as a test before writing any part of the engine.

That week accounts for the third figure below. The engine was validated against 340 historical quotes and matched all of them, so no pricing had to be corrected after launch.

Outcome

The desk has been in production for seven months. Dispatchers handle roughly three times the quote volume they did previously, and the spreadsheet has been retired. The next phase extends the same screen to carrier-side pricing.