I’m Michelle Hamad, Business Intelligence Architect for RWI Logistics, a third-party logistics provider that uses business intelligence, freight management, and brokerage to address supply chain issues for its customers. To help our sales reps make daily pricing choices more quickly, we built a pricing database in Domo.

We have a formal process for pricing major customer requests for proposals. However, many of our deals are smaller, one-off opportunities and in many cases just a single load. Sales representatives quote these routine opportunities using their own preferred methods, which typically includes intuition and researching the market using internal and external sources.

Use case

Our sales representatives are the ones who interact most with customers, so they have valuable insight that would be lost if we completely automated the quoting process. To ensure that sales reps have all the information they need, we serve them data points in a single location. This way, they can be confident they haven’t underbid on projects and remain competitive while also dedicating more time to customer relationships. By automating research, we free up their time while ensuring they don’t leave money on the table.

We use Domo to aggregate and combine multiple sources of pricing information, including RWI’s load history, current and past quotes from carriers, external market data, and more. We present the data to our reps in a simple dashboard that displays rate trends over time and a list of carriers who have run similar lanes (origin and destination combinations) in the past.

Conclusion

Adoption of the new tool was rapid and enthusiastic!  It’s frequently used by our reps. A great sign of success are the suggestions we get weekly for expansion and improvement. This example demonstrates how information technology can work alongside human talent, rather than trying to replace it.