Cut quote turnaround from 3 days to 20 minutes

Every freight quote started as an email, got forwarded to pricing, waited in a spreadsheet queue, and came back days later — often after the customer had booked elsewhere. Sales lived in Outlook; pricing lived in Excel; the CRM saw none of it.

Nordfracht didn't want another system to log into. They wanted quoting to happen where the request already was: inside the inbox.

We built the quote engine as a standalone API — rates, margins, approval rules — and put its primary interface inside Outlook as a task-pane add-in. When a quote request arrives, the add-in reads the message via Microsoft Graph, extracts the lane and load, prices it against live rate tables, and inserts a formatted quote into the reply.

The deliberate trade-off: no separate quoting portal at all in phase one. Building inside Outlook meant wrestling with add-in runtime limits and Graph throttling, but it also meant zero adoption effort — the tool appeared inside the workflow the team already had.

Quotes now go out in a median of 20 minutes. Win rate on quoted lanes rose 31% in the first two quarters, mostly from simply answering first. Three years on, the platform prices the majority of Nordfracht's spot business, and we still maintain it under an SLA.