Camille SuttonLVL 6

@camille-sutton · Jul 25

Quote turnaround: four hours to twenty minutes

Cedarline Logistics, 11,400 historical lanes, and why cleaning the data was the whole job.

Cedarline is a mid-size freight broker. A rate quote took about four hours because a dispatcher had to dig through three years of spreadsheets to find a comparable lane.

We pulled 11,400 historical lanes. About a fifth were unusable — duplicate entries, lanes recorded backwards, one depot spelled four different ways.

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Cleaning that took six weeks. Training the quote assistant on top of it took a weekend.

We piloted with four dispatchers for two weeks. Week one produced two quotes that came back well under on partial loads, both caught before they went out. Partial loads were thin in the training data, so we added a confidence floor: below it, the assistant refuses to quote and hands to a human.

It over-refers now, deliberately. The dispatchers said they would rather see "ask a human" than a wrong number, and they are right.

Twenty minutes, measured across the pilot.