The bill of lading typed twice
The customer emails a PO or a bill of lading, dispatch keys it into the transportation system, and billing keys it again. In a forty-truck carrier that is one full-time seat spent copying.
AI consulting · Joliet, Illinois
The fastest-growing county in the metro runs on companies that passed twenty people and never rebuilt the office around it. We sit down with all of them and write the plan.
About an hour down I-80. First call is free.
Joliet is where the metro's freight changes hands. The I-80 and I-55 crossing, the rail intermodal yards south of town, the warehouse belt running toward Elwood and the new Houbolt Road interchange feeding it: this is the region's main hub for national distribution, and the companies around it are not small. Third-party warehouses with fifty people on the floor, carriers with forty trucks, the concrete, excavating, electrical and mechanical contractors putting up the buildings. West of the river the subdivisions keep going in, and the trades serving them have grown from three crews to twelve. Downtown, the practices, agencies and offices around the county seat keep filling back in.
Past twenty people, the work in these companies moves between hands, and the handoffs are where the hours go. A dispatcher re-keys the bill of lading the customer already emailed. A project manager types the same change order into the estimate, the schedule and the invoice. The Monday numbers come out of four systems and one person's memory. That is the size the AI Opportunity Assessment is built for: companies of twenty or more, where the owner still knows every name but cannot see every desk.
Over two weeks we sit down with people at every level, from the owner to the driver, the foreman or the front desk, and follow real work from first contact to paid. Every step that eats hours or causes errors gets a number. You see every finding before it goes in the plan. Then you get the plan: what to do first, what is a big swing, what to leave alone, and the math behind it. We charge for the thinking. Building is optional. Joliet is about an hour down I-80, so the interviews happen at your place, usually inside the first week.
What we tend to find
The customer emails a PO or a bill of lading, dispatch keys it into the transportation system, and billing keys it again. In a forty-truck carrier that is one full-time seat spent copying.
On a construction job the change order goes into the estimate, the schedule and the invoice by hand, weeks apart. The gaps between those three entries are where margin quietly disappears.
Dock throughput, crew hours and receivables sit in different systems, so a manager builds the weekly report by hand every Monday. A report that assembles itself is usually the first quick win.
The assessment
The AI Opportunity Assessment runs the same way everywhere: we sit down with the people doing the work, map how a job actually moves, and hand you a written plan for where AI actually helps. Yours to keep, whether we build it or your own people do.
See a sample planNearby
Frankfort, New Lenox and Mokena are minutes east on I-80, with Tinley Park and Orland Park just beyond. The assessment runs the same way in each.
Questions
Yes, that is the shape it is built for. The floor has its own rhythm, but the leaks are usually in the office and at the dock door: receiving paperwork, exceptions, billing. We interview both sides and map the handoffs between them, then order the findings by impact and effort.
Thirty to forty-five minutes per interview, somewhere between three and fifteen interviews depending on your size, all inside the first week. Drivers and crews are interviewed around their routes, not pulled off them. The delivery date is set on day one, so it never drags.
No. We follow the work wherever it goes: an interview at the office, a ride-along to a site on the west side, an hour at a dock in the warehouse belt. Joliet is about an hour down I-80, so site visits fit around your schedule, not ours.
Your next step
Forty-five minutes, free, at your office in Joliet. You'll leave knowing the two or three places we'd look first, and whether the assessment is worth your team's time.
On site across Northwest Indiana & Chicagoland.
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45 minutes to talk through your business and where AI could help.
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