AI Consultancy Case Study

AI is easy to talk about and much harder to put to practical use inside a busy small business. Our case study follows a Nottingham logistics firm whose team was buried in manual quoting and admin, and how a focused AI consultancy engagement gave them hours back every week.

We will explore the repetitive processes that were quietly costing the business time, the workflow automation and AI tools Cloudworks put in place, and the results the team saw within the first few months.

The names of the business and people have been changed but this was a real engagement - we are able to have a call with this client if you would like a reference before any potential AI consultancy work.

Overview

Organisation

Thornbury Logistics, a Nottingham-based haulage and distribution company handling several hundred customer enquiries and quotes each month.

Challenge

Customer enquiries arrived through the website, email and phone, and every single one was manually copied into a quoting spreadsheet before a rate could be worked out and sent back. The same customer details were often typed into three different systems, quotes routinely took over a day to turn around, and the office team had no time left for the higher-value work of chasing new business.

Solution

Cloudworks ran an AI readiness audit of Thornbury Logistics' existing tools and processes, then delivered a combination of workflow automation and an AI-assisted quoting tool to remove the repetitive manual steps, without replacing the core systems the team already knew.

The focus throughout was practical: automate the tasks that were genuinely repetitive and rules-based, and leave judgement calls with the experienced team members who were best placed to make them.

Objective

The primary objectives were to:

Centralise enquiries from the website, email and phone into a single place.
Remove manual data entry between the website, CRM and quoting spreadsheet.
Speed up quote turnaround without lowering accuracy.
Free up office staff time for customer-facing work.

Implementation Process

Step 1: AI Readiness Audit

Cloudworks began by mapping every enquiry channel and the manual steps between a customer's first contact and a quote landing in their inbox. This surfaced exactly where time was being lost and which tasks were genuinely repetitive rather than requiring judgement.

The audit found:

Website enquiries were manually re-typed into the CRM and quoting spreadsheet.
Base rate calculations followed clear, repeatable rules, but were still worked out by hand each time.
Follow-up chasing on unanswered quotes was inconsistent and often forgotten entirely.

Step 2: Enquiry Automation

Using workflow automation, Cloudworks connected the website enquiry form and shared inbox directly into Thornbury Logistics' CRM, removing manual re-entry and ensuring every enquiry was logged the moment it arrived, regardless of which channel it came through.

Step 3: AI-Assisted Quoting

Cloudworks built a quoting assistant that read the details of each enquiry, applied Thornbury Logistics' existing rate rules, and produced a draft quote for the team to review and send, rather than calculate from scratch.

Step 4: Automated Follow-Up

A scheduled follow-up sequence was set up to automatically chase quotes that hadn't received a response within a set number of days, a task the team had previously handled inconsistently around other priorities.

Step 5: Staff Training and Handover

Cloudworks trained the office team on the new quoting assistant and CRM workflow, with clear documentation on how each automation worked and how to adjust the rate rules as pricing changed.

Results

The AI consultancy engagement delivered measurable time savings within the first quarter:

1. Quote Turnaround Cut from a Day to Under an Hour: Draft quotes are now produced automatically as soon as an enquiry is logged, ready for a quick review rather than a full calculation from scratch.
2. Around 12 Hours a Week Given Back to the Office Team: Removing manual data entry and rate calculation freed up time that is now spent on customer calls and chasing new business.
3. No More Lost Enquiries: Every enquiry, regardless of channel, now lands in the CRM automatically, with nothing depending on someone remembering to type it in.
4. Higher Quote Response Rate: Automated follow-up chasing increased the proportion of quotes that received a customer response.
5. A Team Confident Using the New Tools: Because the automation mirrored the team's existing rate rules rather than replacing their judgement, adoption was immediate with no resistance from staff.

Testimonial

"We'd heard a lot about AI but assumed it was for bigger companies with bigger budgets. Cloudworks showed us exactly where it would actually save us time, and it just works quietly in the background now."

– Rachel Nunn, Office Manager, Thornbury Logistics

Why Choose Cloudworks for AI Consultancy?

Good AI consultancy isn't about chasing the latest buzzword — it's about finding the handful of repetitive tasks quietly costing your team the most time, and automating exactly those. We look at your business first and the technology second.

If your team is spending hours a week on repetitive admin or manual data entry, contact our team today for a free AI readiness conversation.