A freight desk priced air and sea in spreadsheets, mailed them as PDFs, then retyped the accepted one into an invoice. Now every figure is entered once.
Two freight modes on one desk. Air prices per kilo against a flight, sea per container against a sailing. Quotes lived in Excel, rates in email, the accepted one was retyped into the ledger and the invoice retyped again.
The obvious fix was a general ERP with a freight add-on. Each one quoted asked the desk to price sea the way it prices air, or to run two products side by side. That asymmetry is the business — flattening it sells them their own workaround.
Sat with the desk through a live air quote and a live sea quote, writing down every figure it typed more than once.
D 1Modelled one abstract quotation both modes inherit, with money, numbering and workflow owned by a service layer neither mode copies.
D 2Shipped air, then sea, then the customer portal, proforma, tax invoice and carrier tracking that hang off an accepted quote.
D 3—10Added the MCP server an agent files enquiries through, the dashboard that reads every register, and the per-client Dokploy deploy.
D 11 →“Sea shipped the day after air, because the core had already refused to know which mode it was serving. 1,788 tests keep it that way.”