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Solution · Sales & marketingThe rules do the arithmetic and the price reaches the customer the same hour
A freight quote out while the enquiry is still warm
Enquiries are read as they arrive and priced from your rate card, surcharge and accessorial rules; only quotes below the margin band wait for a person.
Executive summary
Your answer goes out Thursday; the load was booked Tuesday with whoever priced it first.
The flow runs on the UiPath Platform and the Microsoft 365 tenant you already pay for.
The answer reaches the customer while the enquiry is still open, which is where spot awards are won or lost.
quote register as a SharePoint list; TMS booking on acceptance; Power BI reports
Business problem
Rates and quoting
A forwarder sells a price. There is no catalogue: every enquiry is a pricing exercise built from a lane, equipment, a date, a set of risks and a margin rule, and the same four lines went to three other companies. The order goes to the price that is credible and early.
The inputs are real and written down, just written down in different places. Contracted rates sit in a workbook per customer; the fuel surcharge, in most forwarding offices, is a percentage against a published diesel index kept in a separate file; tolls belong to the route and equipment premiums to what the branch can source that week. The accessorials that decide whether a load earns anything live in one person's memory: waiting beyond the free period, a second drop, pallet exchange.
Margin authority makes it slower still. Every company has a floor below which a quote needs a manager, and that manager is in a meeting, at a customer or on the road. The approval rests on a sentence in a chat rather than on the calculation behind it.
At scale the missing piece is the record. A won quote becomes an order in the TMS; a lost quote leaves no lane, no price, no reason. So the annual rate review is an argument between people who remember different weeks.
How it works today
This is the shape of a quoting desk in most forwarding offices before anything is automated.
- PersonAn enquiry arrives in the shared mailbox, on the customer's portal or by phone, and a forwarder claims it on the thread
- PersonThe lane is looked up in the customer's rate workbook, or estimated from a distance band when it is not there
- SystemThe fuel surcharge, the toll allowance and the equipment premium are read from separate files and added by hand
- WaitingAccessorials are settled by asking a colleague or the branch that runs the lane, which takes minutes or the morning
- PersonThe forwarder writes the quote as an email, stating some assumptions and leaving others implied
- WaitingQuotes below the margin floor wait for a manager's approval by phone or chat, into the next afternoon
- Risk of errorWon quotes are typed into the TMS; lost quotes are recorded nowhere, so nobody knows what the market paid
Why the current process costs more than it appears
Nobody planned this work; it accumulated.
- Speed decides more awards than price does. On a spot lane with three forwarders invited, the second answer often meets a decision already taken, and the hours that made it late went on lookups.
- Assumptions held in a forwarder's head rather than in the quote return as billing arguments. Free waiting time and pallet exchange are agreed by silence, and the accessorial invoice weeks later is the first the customer hears of it.
- Quotes that lose are the most valuable data the company never keeps. Win rate by lane and equipment is the only honest measure of whether a rate table sits above or below the market, and won orders alone cannot produce it.
Cost of inaction
A lost enquiry produces no document, no complaint and no line in any system, which is why this process survives. The hours above are countable; the revenue that went to whoever answered on Tuesday is not, and no report separates a load lost on price from one lost on the calendar.
The rate card is the part that ages. Rates are renegotiated once a year against a market that moves every month, and the only evidence a forwarder brings is the quotes that were accepted. Without the refused ones, the table is corrected by whoever argues best.
A plausible organisation with realistic proportions. The figures are there to be recalculated on your data; they are not a client result.
A Polish freight forwarder, 180 staff across three branches, moving groupage and full loads between Poland, Germany, the Benelux and Italy; a TMS, a CRM, Microsoft 365 E3, twelve forwarders on the desk.
1,450 enquiries a month; roughly 70% by email, 20% from customers' portals, 10% through a load exchange or by phone; about a third fall on contracted lanes, the rest are spot.
Each quote is assembled by hand from the rate workbook, the surcharge file, a toll allowance and whatever the branch says the accessorials are; anything below the margin floor waits for a manager.
About 21 minutes per enquiry of lookup, calculation, writing and chasing an approval, and a median answer landing the following working day.
Enquiries are read as they arrive; rules build the price from the contracted rate card, the surcharge for the period, the equipment and the lane's accessorials; quotes inside the approved band go out in minutes with their assumptions written in, the rest reach the named approver in Microsoft Teams.
In the modelled case the desk answers the same hour, every quote carries the assumptions it was priced on, and won and lost quotes sit in one register. Nothing here comes from a client engagement; the numbers are a model.
Proposed solution
The flow runs on the UiPath Platform and the Microsoft 365 tenant you already pay for. The Microsoft Outlook 365 connector watches the quoting mailbox; a robot signs in to portals that offer only a screen. Every enquiry becomes a queue item in UiPath Orchestrator, and UiPath Document Understanding reads the message and its attachments, returning places, dates, weight, pallets, equipment and ADR with a confidence score per field; anything below the threshold becomes a validation task rather than a guess.
The pricing is deterministic, and deliberately so. A rule set owned by forwarding and finance matches the lane against the contracted rate card, falls back to the distance band and equipment tariff where there is none, applies the surcharge for the period and adds the toll allowance and the lane's accessorials. No model invents a number: the engine reads, the rules calculate, every figure comes from a table your own people maintain.
Margin decides whether a person is needed. Quotes inside the approved band leave the mailbox in minutes, with the assumptions and the validity written into the message. A quote below it becomes a task in UiPath Action Center that the named approver completes inside Microsoft Teams, showing the cost build, the breached rule and recent prices on the lane; the approver releases, adjusts or declines.
Every quote is then written to one register: inputs, price, assumptions, approvals, outcome. It is a SharePoint list in your tenant, read by Power BI, so win rate by lane and customer becomes a report instead of an argument.
UiPath Document Understanding with confidence scores and Document Validation actions; UiPath Orchestrator queues, triggers, assets and audit log; UiPath Action Center actionable notifications in Microsoft Teams; UiPath Integration Service connectors for Microsoft Outlook 365 and Microsoft OneDrive & SharePoint; Power BI over a SharePoint list
Intake across the mailbox, the portals and load-board notifications; the extraction schema and thresholds; the rate, surcharge, toll and equipment rules; the accessorial table per lane type; margin bands and approver routing; the quote template, the register and the reports
The TMS booking on acceptance, by documented interface where the vendor publishes one and otherwise by file exchange or its screens; customer and segment data from the CRM; sign-in on screen-only portals
How the automated process works
- AutomationThe mailbox, the portals and the load-board notifications are polled; every enquiry becomes a queue item with its channel, customer and arrival time
- AutomationDocument Understanding reads the message and its attachments and returns lane, dates, weight, pallets, equipment and ADR, with a confidence score per field
- PersonFields below the threshold, and enquiries missing what no rule can supply, go to a validation task settled in seconds
- SystemThe rules price the load: contracted rate or distance band, surcharge for the period, toll allowance, equipment premium, accessorials for the lane
- AutomationQuotes inside the approved band leave the mailbox in minutes, carrying the assumptions, the validity and a reference
- PersonQuotes below it reach the named approver in Microsoft Teams with the cost build and the breached rule, who releases, adjusts or declines
- AutomationEvery quote, sent or declined, is written to the register; acceptance creates the TMS booking, and the customer's answer or a lapsed validity closes the record
- AutomationPower BI reports win rate, quoted margin and answer time by lane, customer and forwarder
Human-in-the-loop model
Automation handles
- Intake from every channel, recognition of a repeated enquiry, matching to a customer and segment
- Reading the enquiry and its attachments, and putting uncertain fields to a person instead of guessing
- The arithmetic: contracted rate or tariff, surcharge, tolls, equipment premium, accessorials and margin
- Sending the quote, filling the register, booking on acceptance and closing lapsed quotes
People decide
- Any price below the margin band, released, adjusted or declined by the named approver in Microsoft Teams
- Lanes with no contracted purchase rate, where a forwarder must secure capacity before a price means anything
- Uncertain or missing enquiry data, confirmed or corrected in a validation task
- The rules themselves: rate cards, surcharge periods, accessorial tariffs and margin floors stay with the business
Before and after
Systems and integrations
Everything below runs on licences and systems you already hold, or would need anyway.
Inputs
- quoting shared mailbox in Outlook
- customer portals with no interface but a screen
- load-board notifications
- contracted rate cards and the surcharge table
- CRM customer and segment data
Automation layer
- UiPath Orchestrator
- UiPath Robots
- UiPath Document Understanding
- UiPath Integration Service
- UiPath Action Center
Target systems
- quote register as a SharePoint list
- TMS booking on acceptance
- Power BI reports
Human touchpoints: margin approval in Microsoft Teams; Document Validation action; quoting-desk channel in Teams
Technologies used
reads enquiries and attachments: lane, dates, weight, pallets, equipment, ADR; confidence score per field
Aone queue item per enquiry, the pricing rules, portal sign-ins, retries, rate tables as versioned assets, audit
ADocument Validation actions for uncertain fields; the margin approval as an app task in Microsoft Teams
A"email received" trigger on the quoting mailbox; the quote sent from that same address
Athe quote register as a SharePoint list; enquiry originals filed with each record
Amargin approvals as actionable notifications; a channel post before a quote lapses
Awin rate, quoted margin and answer time by lane, customer and forwarder, read from the register
AIllustrative economic model
A model, not a promise.
Twelve forwarders share the 1,450 enquiries, and the table prices only their desk work: finding the lane, reading the surcharge, settling accessorials with a colleague, writing the message and chasing an approval. €25 an hour is a fully loaded forwarder cost in Poland. Nothing below was measured at a client, and the margin an earlier answer wins sits outside the arithmetic.
Run the numbers on your data
An illustrative estimate from your own inputs. It models released capacity; it is not a promise of savings.
Business benefits
- The answer reaches the customer while the enquiry is still open, which is where spot awards are won or lost
- Every forwarder quotes a lane the same way, so the price no longer depends on who was free
- Assumptions and validity are written into the quote, so an accessorial billed later was priced up front
- Margin approvals happen in Microsoft Teams against the cost build, in minutes rather than in a manager's gaps
- Won and lost quotes sit in one register, so win rate by lane and customer is a number rather than a recollection
The management view
- Answer time stops being anecdotal: median hours from enquiry to quote are visible per branch and customer
- The margin floor applies to every quote, not only to the ones that reach a manager, and each exception carries its reason
- Rate cards and surcharge periods are corrected against won and lost evidence, so the next negotiation starts from data
- Quoting capacity follows the enquiry count rather than the headcount, which matters most when volume moves
Board-level KPIs
Security and governance
Where the data sits and who can see it.
- The robot has its own account, with Microsoft Graph permissions scoped to the quoting mailbox alone through Exchange RBAC for Applications, and its portal and TMS sign-ins live in an Orchestrator credential store rather than in a workflow or a log
- Enquiries, quotes, rate cards and the register stay in your Microsoft 365 tenant; extraction and orchestration run in the EU region of UiPath Automation Cloud
- Pricing is not a black box: rate tables, surcharge periods, accessorial tariffs and margin bands are versioned assets, each change a dated, attributable edit
- A quote below the band cannot be released by the person who priced it, and every decision is logged with a user and a timestamp
Why now
Eurostat published the 2025 road freight figures on 31 July 2026: EU road transport reached 1,886 billion tonne-kilometres, 0.9% above 2024, with cross-trade down 3.7% and cabotage down 3.0%. Growth is not arriving evenly, so the next load is won from a competitor rather than from a rising market, on the day the price arrives.
Reading a semi-structured enquiry with a confidence score on every field, and approving inside Microsoft Teams, are platform capabilities today rather than a development project.
The desk capacity at stake in the model is about €12,700 a month, spent on lookups a rule set finishes in a second.
Relevant executive roles
Answer time becomes a number the company manages, and the enquiries it loses stop being invisible
Every quote is priced against a margin rule that is applied rather than remembered, and the gap between quoted and achieved margin becomes visible
Forwarders spend the day on capacity, customers and exceptions, and the rate card is defended with evidence
Common questions and objections
Rules do not price the unusual ones. They price the lanes your rate card and tariff cover, which on most desks is the large majority, and hand the rest to a forwarder with the file assembled. The aim is not to remove judgement but to stop spending it on arithmetic.
The band is yours and applies to every quote, including those that used to go out without a manager seeing them. Anything below the floor stops for the named approver, who now sees the cost build instead of a number in a chat.
That is normal, and it is why extraction returns a confidence score on each field rather than a flat answer. Free text is read like an attachment, and what the model is unsure of becomes a five-second confirmation, not a wrong price.
When this is not the right solution
- Fewer than roughly two hundred enquiries a month, where the desk is not the constraint and a shared rate file will do more
- Project, heavy-lift, charter or multimodal work priced from scratch, where there is no rate basis for a rule to apply
- Quoting that already runs inside a TMS quotation module with rates maintained in it; the problem there is data maintenance, not assembling the price
A question for the next management meeting
Did we lose last quarter's enquiries on price or on the day we answered, and is there anything in this company that could tell the difference?
Implementation approach
The first week looks the same at every client: we look at the data.
We deliver
- One month of your enquiries and the quotes that answered them, read for channels, formats and lost minutes; the extraction schema and thresholds tuned on your formats
- The pricing rule set: rate cards, distance bands, surcharge periods, toll allowances, equipment premiums, accessorials per lane type
- Margin bands, approver routing and the Teams approval with the cost build attached
- The quote template with its assumptions block, the register, the TMS booking and the Power BI reports
- A pilot on one branch, then rollout with hypercare and a desk runbook
We need from you
- Three months of enquiries with the quotes you sent and what became of each
- Your rate cards, surcharge rules, toll allowances and accessorial tariffs in whatever form they exist
- A process owner on the desk and someone in finance who owns the margin floors
- The quoting mailbox, a SharePoint site, and TMS and portal accounts
Stages
Discovery
Enquiries and quotes read end to end: channels, formats, lanes, pricing inputs
Design
Rule set, margin bands, approver matrix, quote template, security model
Build
Intake, extraction, pricing rules, Teams approvals, register and TMS booking
Validation
Historical enquiries re-priced and compared with what your forwarders quoted
Go-live
One branch under supervision, then the rest with hypercare
Optimisation
Thresholds, accessorial rules and margin bands tuned on the register
Departmental. Effort follows the number of rate structures behind your quotes, how many enquiries arrive as free text, and whether the TMS takes a booking through an interface.
A price sent on Thursday competes with three that went out on Tuesday.
Send us two hundred recent enquiries with the prices you quoted and what became of each. We come back with the share a rule set would price unaided, the exceptions that would still reach a forwarder, and the lanes where your rate card is losing money.
Test your rate rules on 200 enquiriesThe neighbouring process usually has the same problem
Ninety customers, ninety ways of sending an order, and a forwarder retyping every one into the TMS.
View solution Finance & accountingFreight billed the day it is delivered, not the month afterOrders wait for the month-end billing run, and the accessorials written on a driver's note are never billed.
View solution ProcurementSupplier quotes compared within the hourStop paying buyers to retype prices, units and lead times from PDFs into comparison sheets.
View solutionIndustries we deliver this in most oftenTransport & logistics