🔒 Private — prepared for Briana and Cindi (RCB principals). Not for staff.
Overview / Session Notes / Briana's Freight Tool Walkthrough

Session Notes: Briana's Freight Tool Walkthrough

2026-06-01 · Briana Riordan + Nate St. Pierre

Overview

This session was a walkthrough of the freight quoting process at RCB Awards / Exquisite Images and the automation attempt Briana had already built — and eventually abandoned — using Claude's browser extension. Briana walked Nate through the current manual workflow, then showed him her Claude conversation log where she had gotten most of the way to a working tool before running into issues she couldn't resolve. The session was primarily observational: Briana describing and demonstrating, Nate asking clarifying questions and noting what the conversation history revealed about where things broke down.

The session was relatively short — Nate flagged at the start that the freight tool might represent 40 minutes of daily manual work. He wanted to understand what Briana had built before deciding how to approach it.

The Freight Quoting Process

Every time RCB Awards sells a project to a distributor, they need to quote freight before the order is finalized. The process starts with the purchase order, which contains the part number and the order quantity. From there, the team has to look up the carton dimensions for that part number — how many units fit in a box, how much the box weighs, and its physical dimensions (length, width, height). That data lives on the Exquisite Images website (exquisiteimagesllc.com).

Once they have the carton data, they calculate how many cartons the order requires, then enter that into the UPS "Calculate Time and Cost" tool to get a full rate table — showing every service level from ground to overnight, with the number of transit days and the cost for each. The team wants to keep that entire rate table, not just the option they quote, because sometimes a client's needs change after the initial quote. If something shifts and they need to upgrade from ground to two-day, they want to reference the original table rather than run the whole calculation again.

After pulling the UPS rates, they apply a markup using a separate Excel tool and then attach the result to the order in Antera Advance, their order management system. The current workflow requires three screens open simultaneously: the PO, the UPS calculator, and the Excel markup tool. The team manually moves information between them and takes a screenshot of the rate table to save it.

Nate estimated this process runs roughly ten times a day and takes about four minutes per quote, which comes out to around forty minutes daily or two hundred minutes per week.

Briana's Previous Automation Attempt

Briana had already tried to automate this process herself using Claude. She walked Nate through the conversation log she had kept. Her approach used Claude's desktop application combined with Claude's Chrome browser extension — the extension allows Claude to take control of the browser, move the mouse, fill out forms, and take screenshots of what it sees.

The workflow she built worked roughly like this: she uploaded a purchase order to Claude, and Claude extracted the part number and order quantity. Then Claude used the browser extension to navigate to the company website, search for the product, and pull the carton dimensions from the product page. It had some difficulty locating and using the website's search box initially, but eventually got there. Then Claude navigated to the UPS calculator, filled out the form with the shipment details, and captured the rate table from the result page.

She said getting through that initial setup took an hour or two. Once it worked, Claude had achieved the core task: it had gone from a purchase order to a completed rate table without her having to touch multiple screens.

From there, she wanted Claude to save the rate table to an Excel file and append new entries for each PO processed, rather than creating a new file each time. She told Claude where to save it on SharePoint, and Claude was given access. Briana noted that giving Claude access to SharePoint made her nervous — "the Spidey sense was going off" — but she proceeded.

The problem came when she asked how to make the tool accessible to her team so they wouldn't each need to set up the browser extension on their own computers. Claude offered several options — building a Python app with the Anthropic API, or using Make or an n8n workflow. Briana chose the Python/app option, and from there things fell apart. Claude generated a zip file, she extracted it, got into the command line, started running into configuration issues, and eventually reached a point where she felt like she might damage her computer if she kept going. She had gotten an Anthropic API/console account partway through this. She gave up.

Nate looked at the conversation and noted that the chat had gotten very long by that point — Claude was re-processing the entire conversation history with every turn, which causes it to lose track of previously resolved issues and make mistakes on things it had already figured out. He said this is a common failure mode with complex multi-step tasks in a single chat thread: it works fine for simple one-shot things, but the longer and more complex the thread, the more context degradation becomes a problem.

He also noted that the app Briana got open at the end technically existed but didn't function. It looked like something, but didn't do anything yet.

Technical Details Observed

The combination of Claude desktop app and Chrome extension allowed Claude to see, in real time, what was happening in a separate browser window — taking screenshots and extracting data from them, rather than having direct programmatic access to the pages. Nate found this interesting; he hadn't seen the desktop-app-to-browser-extension bridge work quite that way before.

The carton dimension data that Claude scraped from the website was the key dependency — it needed units per carton, carton weight, and carton dimensions for each part number. The website was the only source Briana knew to pull this from. Claude had some trouble with the website's search functionality, which is a fragility point in the workflow.

Antera Advance, the order management system, doesn't have built-in freight quoting capability. Whatever is calculated externally has to be entered manually into the order record.

What Nate Took Away from the Session

Nate asked Briana to share the Claude conversation log with him if possible (not via the public share link, but by copying the content). He said seeing exactly what she had built and where it broke down would help him figure out the best way to rebuild it and avoid repeating the dead ends she already hit.

He also briefly mentioned that some of the challenges she'd run into (the context window issues, the trouble managing complex multi-step tasks in a single thread) were things he could help her work around in a general way — better approaches to using Claude for ongoing, multi-step workflows rather than trying to do everything in one chat. That wasn't the focus of this session, but he flagged it as something worth covering later.

Follow-Ups

  • Briana to share the Claude conversation log from her automation attempt (copy/paste content, not the public share link)
  • Nate to review the conversation log to assess what was built and classify the build type before recommending a path forward
  • Confirm: can the carton dimensions data be exported from the website or Antera as a flat file, or does it need to be looked up live each time?
  • Confirm: what does the markup formula look like?
  • Confirm: how many team members need to run freight quotes?