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Logistics between Mexico and the United States

A quote that gets built by talking

A carrier that hauls oversize loads across the border was running without any system at all: quotes in spreadsheets, driver assignments on a whiteboard, and the shipping process in one person’s head. In three months its whole operation was online, in two languages, and today it runs it on its own.

The goal

Respond faster and with fewer errors to its main customer, without growing the office, and get control of what carried the most risk: the permits for every haul, because its contract made it liable for fines and delays.

How it worked before

• Every quote was put together by copying an Excel template and filling in cells by hand.
• Assignments lived on a whiteboard organized by project. The same driver, tractor or trailer could end up on two projects at once, and the whiteboard gave no warning.
• The shipping process existed only in the head of their dispatch manager.
• Permits were handled through an outside permit agent, and delays were documented over WhatsApp.

What we did

• April 2026: together with their dispatch manager, we mapped the critical path of a shipment, step by step, and turned it into the process diagram.
• May 2026: the fleet synchronized daily; the quoting tool, where you describe the trip to the assistant, by text or by voice, and it fills in the fields; a dashboard on the office screen; permit tracking with urgency colors; assignments that warn about conflicts; and a mode that lets each driver work from their own phone. Quotes come out as PDFs in Spanish or in English.
• June 2026: an agent that turns every incoming request email into a quote, a quoting tool for hauls within Mexico, plain language questions about the whole operation, and a daily alert on permits at risk of not arriving on time.
• July 2026: the assistant classifies the type of service on its own, the rate drops in bands as distance grows, and an approved rate table makes it possible to quote even when the owner is away. On top of that, a register of twenty-seven risks tied to the process diagram.

The impact, measured with CREO

I measure the impact of every project with four questions, which I call CREO: did the company become more Competitive? Did it improve its Return, meaning its profitability? Is it more Efficient? Does it meet its Obligations better, the tax, legal and contractual ones? Not every project hits all four, and here are the ones that apply.

Competitiveness

Its customer went from warning that prices were not sustainable to sending quote requests again. The customer’s plant manager asked for access to the dashboard to show it to the company’s CEO, and described what they saw as “professionalism, commitment, processes, transparency.”

Obligations

Every permit has its tracking, its document and its risk alert before the deadline the contract imposes runs out. The risk register put in writing what can go wrong at each step and which control prevents it, and twelve of the twenty-seven are already mitigated.

Efficiency

The fleet updates itself, assignment conflicts are detected on their own, request emails become quotes on their own, and a quote gets built by describing the trip.

Return

The distance-band rate and the rate table put pricing in writing and on firm criteria, instead of calculating it each time. The next step, knowing the real cost of each haul, has been laid out.

The result

• Everything above reached daily use. In July 2026 the system moved to the carrier’s own computer, and the carrier runs it on its own with monthly maintenance.
• Their dispatch manager uses it every day and keeps asking for improvements, which is the best sign the system is theirs.
• The owner adopted CREO to decide which initiative comes next.

More with less

It was built by one advisor and one analyst in about three months. It runs on a small computer the client already owned, the artificial intelligence costs less than five dollars a month, and drivers use it from their own phones. Zero new licenses, zero new servers and zero new hires.