Quote-to-Closeout TMS

Challenge

A growing 3PL operator had outgrown its admin tooling. Multiple intake channels — public wizard, contact form, chat, Gmail ingestion, admin quote calculator — created divergent records of the same shipment. Customer signatures were partly working, B/L drafts had no review loop, and payment release was disconnected from document state. The board wanted a defensible operating model, not more tools.

Approach

1. 01

   Adopted a projection-based customer task model — no parallel customer_task_package tables. Tasks are projections of the SSOT.

2. 02

   Collapsed five intake paths into one canonical lead-creation service with provenance tracked per source.

3. 03

   Built the customer workspace as a single guided link with grouped nav, progress bar, and task panels — never scattered form links.

4. 04

   Hardened the Odyssey carrier-rate automation bot using local Playwright, secure service-role separation, and an admin queue for human review.

5. 05

   Wired Stripe Checkout + PaymentIntents with proper webhook reconciliation, gated B/L release on payment + signature state.

6. 06

   Integrated Groq AI for chatbot lead capture and quote enrichment, with structured handoff into the same SSOT.

Outcome

The 3PL now operates on one canonical workflow: inquiry → quote → acceptance → shipment → documents → payment → closeout, with every step instrumented and auditable. The platform has shipped 30+ admin pages, 107 API routes, and 37 migrations to date, with the projection model standing up to real operational load.