How the Freight Quote Tool is built
There was one major engineering build this engagement — the Freight Quote Tool — so this section is dedicated to it. This page is the plain-English tour; the full set of formal build documents is in the sidebar. All of it is written so any competent developer — or your own team — could pick the tool up and keep it running. And the source comes with you: the tool's full repository is included as a zip in your Document Pack, so you (or any developer) can maintain, edit, or redeploy it.
What it does
Enter a part number, quantity, and destination ZIP and the tool returns live UPS negotiated rates and transit times for every available service level, side by side, in seconds. One link, email-PIN login, nothing installed, no credentials sitting on anyone's desktop. A manual mode lets you enter carton weight and dimensions by hand — for one-offs, or for the small slice of the catalog (crystal) that has no dimensions in the export.
It's built for about five users on the Exquisite Images side, a couple dozen quotes on a busy day. It deliberately replaces the two things that defeated the original prototype: a browser extension logged in as one person, and a per-machine installer.
How it's put together
A single Cloudflare Worker serves a small web page plus a behind-the-scenes data service, all sitting behind Cloudflare Access (the email-PIN login). No installs, one URL. The pieces:
- The page — one screen with two modes: item lookup (part #, quantity, ZIP, residential/commercial toggle — it shows the carton specs it found, which you can override) and manual (enter the carton weight and dimensions yourself).
- Product lookup — a small product table loaded from your SAGE catalog export (item number → carton dimensions, weight per carton, units per carton), used to compute how many cartons an order ships in and its billable weight.
- UPS integration — the tool authenticates to UPS and calls the Rating API with the "show time in transit" option, so one request returns all services with negotiated cost and transit time. If negotiated rates ever come back missing, it shows published rates with a visible marker rather than failing silently.
- Catalog refresh — an admin-only "upload new spreadsheet" button. Re-export from SAGE every week or two and upload it; the tool validates the columns before replacing anything (and tells you exactly what's wrong if the format drifted), then shows a "catalog last updated" date so it's obvious when a refresh is due.
Credentials live securely on the server side only — never in the browser, never in the source code. Access is a list of named email addresses with a roughly two-week login session; a tighter policy gates the admin upload. Adding or removing a person is a quick change to that list.
How it was rolled out
Built in a focused one-to-two-day session (Nate + Pete together). The first hour was a live-rate validation gate — confirm a real UPS negotiated-rate call works before building anything else — then the page, the catalog upload, the lookup and carton math, and the end-to-end quote flow with a UI pass. After the team uses it for real, there's one batched round of tweaks — no open-ended redesign loop.
What's deliberately out of scope (v1)
Scope was kept tight on purpose. Left out of the first version, each a deliberate call: a saved quote log / history (at ~30 seconds a quote, re-running beats storing — cheap to add later if it's missed), PO upload and parsing (that's order-entry territory), a PDF rate sheet, pricing/markup (that lives in your order-entry software), and other carriers (UPS only for now). The cut list is the scope — new ideas go to the tweak round or a separate conversation.
Ownership & source
The tool runs on your own Cloudflare account — client-owned and in your hands. The source code lives in a private repository that's yours: the stack is intentionally standard and boring, so any competent shop — or your own team — can pick it up and keep it running without us. You're never locked in.
The full build documentation
This overview is the short version. The complete, as-delivered documents are all in the sidebar:
- Product Requirements — what it is, who it's for, and every in/out-of-scope decision.
- Technical Design — the architecture: the Worker, database, Access, and the UPS integration.
- Implementation Plan — how the build was sequenced, and the risks planned for.
- Installation — standing it up from scratch in a Cloudflare account.
- Maintenance — access, UPS keys, the catalog format, declared value, and deploys.
- Usage — the day-to-day "how do I quote" guide, plus where to access the tool.
- License — your perpetual right to use and modify it.
For the quick tool card (and the live access link), see Freight Quote Tool under Your Tools.