The slow part of a hand-priced quote was never the pricing. It was the asking.
Most of what this car transport business quotes is priced by its website on the spot. Some jobs can't be: a boat, a caravan, a car that doesn't run, a trip to somewhere no truck goes every week. About 400 of those a week go to staff, who email a carrier or two for a price, wait, add it up, and send the customer a quote.
Customers were typically waiting eight and a half hours for those quotes. Now it is about two.
Not in the pricing. Staff are quick once the carrier prices are in. The time went before that, while the request sat until someone was free to write the emails. A request that arrived after the office closed waited nearly ten hours before a carrier even heard about it.
The booking system now does the asking. It works out which carriers suit the job, using the rules the staff already followed, and emails them a few minutes after the customer presses the button, from five in the morning until nine at night. One carrier takes requests through a form on its website, so the system fills in the form instead.
When the replies come in it reads them, adds the margin and the pickup or delivery leg, and puts the finished price in front of a person. That person checks it and presses send. The system never sends a price it has just worked out on its own.
At 2.12 someone asked for a price on a trailer coming down from Darwin. That takes two carriers: one for the long haul to the depot, another from the depot to the door. Both were emailed at 2.17. One had answered by 2.21, the other by 2.33, and the price was waiting for staff that same minute. It went to the customer at 2.40.
Twenty-eight minutes, and nobody typed an email.
Nearly 900 carrier emails have gone out without anyone writing them. More than half of the hand-priced quotes had their price worked out and waiting when staff opened them, typically in about half an hour.
The jobs the rules don't cover yet take as long as they always did. So every week the rules cover a few more.