When I joined TEU Global's airfreight pricing department in April 2024, the entire operation was one person — the colleague who trained me. The company's core business was ocean freight; airfreight pricing was a lean, scrappy addition handled almost entirely through manual email coordination.
A single RFQ wasn't a simple task. Each quote required checking with truckers for the nearest viable cargo airport, verifying with multiple airlines whether they had the right equipment and could handle the cargo dimensions, coordinating those outreaches simultaneously via email, tracking every reply, and — if the quote converted — staying on the shipment through to delivery. One RFQ could mean 8–12 separate email threads running in parallel, with no centralized system to track any of it. Volume at that point was 8–10 RFQs per day, plus 2–3 real-time cross-departmental coordination with the operations team.
Two months after I joined, my trainer left. Volume had already started climbing because having two people meant the team could handle more. The day he walked out, I was the airfreight pricing department.
With no documentation, no playbook, and no manager with airfreight experience to escalate to, I built the operation's infrastructure from the ground up.
The first thing we built — my trainer and I, in the two months we overlapped — was a master Excel tracking system, purpose-built for the chaos of multi-threaded email coordination. Every inbound RFQ was logged with its own row. Columns tracked which truckers had been contacted, which airlines had been emailed, whether replies had come in, quote status, and follow-up stage. A separate tab fed into the company's master data sheet used for commercial analysis. It wasn't elegant, but it created something the department had never had: visibility. Anyone on the team could open the tracker and know exactly where every active quote stood.
When he left, maintaining, enforcing, and eventually expanding that system fell entirely to me. As the team grew, I trained every new member on it, added columns as the workflow evolved, and kept it as the single source of truth for the entire operation.
That system became the operational backbone when the team started growing. Around the 4–5 month mark, one colleague transferred in from sea freight pricing and a new hire joined to manage the rising volume. I trained both of them on the tracker, the pricing methodology, the airline and trucker relationships, and the rhythm of the work. The manual email method was still the most reliable approach in an industry where relationships and direct communication matter — so the system had to work with it, not fight it.
By the time the team had rhythm, I could see the ceiling. Manual email coordination worked, but it was the bottleneck. Every airline outreach, every follow-up, every status check was burning time that could go toward more quotes.
I identified CargoAI as the solution, put together the case internally, and pushed for it — attending meetings with both our team and the CargoAI team to get it across the line. There was real hesitation. The team had built trust in the manual process because in freight, reliability matters more than speed. Convincing people to change a workflow they'd come to depend on required demonstrating that CargoAI would complement the existing system, not replace the judgement behind it.
We got it implemented. I also brought CargoOne into the stack. The tools cut coordination time significantly and freed the team to handle more volume without adding headcount proportionally.