SLW Transport

SLW Transport is a Perth heavy haulage and general freight business, running floats, single trailers and road trains from Perth to Pilbara mine sites, plus a container storage yard in High Wycombe. They needed a quoting system that could price complex oversized freight accurately and quickly, without relying on one person's memory.

Every quote at SLW depended on a long list of variables: the client, trailer, destination, forward or back freight, kilometres of dirt road, whether the load needed a pilot vehicle, which permits applied, and how long the truck might sit on site. Each contract client had a printed rate card, annotated by hand and updated as often as weekly when fuel prices moved. Ad-hoc quotes were priced from memory and Google Maps, and could take a couple of weeks. Every manual surcharge was a chance to underquote, and nothing connected the quote to the job, the connote or the invoice.

We workshopped the quoting process with the owner and worked through the source material line by line: rate cards with handwritten notes, client spreadsheets, delivery dockets, invoices and the dirt road logs SLW keeps for fuel tax. Every pricing rule was written down, and where the paperwork contradicted itself, we raised it rather than guessed. We also found mapping data can't reliably tell sealed from unsealed roads, and most mine haul roads aren't mapped at all.

We built a branded web platform with one pricing engine at its core. Staff pick a client, destination, direction and trailer, and the quote is built from that client's active rate card plus every applicable surcharge, fuel levy and negotiated rate, with a numbered reference and an automatic 30-day expiry.

Pricing rules live as data, not code, so SLW updates rates, fees and permits themselves. Rate cards are uploaded as scans or spreadsheets, read with AI, checked against the original and versioned. Dirt road surcharges use confirmed kilometres from SLW's own records, not map estimates.

Storage quotes, connotes with receiver sign-off, the client register and a live pipeline dashboard all sit in the same system. Quoting knowledge that used to live with one person is now something the whole office can use.