About Armorock
Armorock manufactures non-corrosive polymer concrete, specializing in manholes and other structures found in today’s sanitary sewer collections systems. Armorock ships 150-200 loads per month out of its locations in Texas, Florida, and Nevada. Nichole Caldwell, their only Corporate Logistics Manager, is responsible for outbound freight.
The Challenge
Before Portex, Nichole used to spend 10 hours a day writing one-off emails to brokers for competitive freight quotes. She’d created a complex system of excel spreadsheets to keep track of all the load and location details and copy/paste from previous emails. Even when she managed to make good time on her end, she’d wait hours to get quotes from brokers. Already overwhelmed by the time and energy spent, she’d often book the first quote that came in because she was in a time crunch.
While success in her role is estimating pricing accurately and keeping freight cost as low as possible, until Portex she wasn’t able to do that effectively given the constraints of her manual process.
The Solution & Impact
As soon as Nichole used Portex to handle automation and communication, she knew she’d never go back to spreadsheets and email. By creating her own quote request templates—making data entry easier and more accurate—she went from spending 10 hours quoting to just 30 minutes, a savings of 9.5 hours every day.
“I’ve been able to invite more brokers to compete in pricing—we went from 3 to 9—and that’s translated to savings of $125,000 per month on freight spend.”
Booking quotes only takes 25-30 seconds and because other brokers get automated emails of their lost bid, they now respond in minutes instead of hours. Given how easy it is to include more brokers in a quote request, she’s gone from 3 to 9 brokers, and the increased competition amongst brokers has driven savings of 25-30%, translating to ~$125k in savings per month.
“We’ve been able to more accurately price our products and have won more business from highly price sensitive customers.”
Nichole now strategically leverages Portex analytics and reports to keep freight costs under budget. She’s eliminated manual calculations and provided critical broker, lane, and spend data to ensure they’re pricing products accurately. This allowed Armorock to make more competitive bids for highly price sensitive target customers resulting in winning more business.
