New Carrier Approval Workflow

The problem this kills

Someone in procurement finds a carrier who can cover a tight lane, and they want it on the approved list - today. So it gets added to a spreadsheet. No insurance check, no authority check, and nobody noticed that the same trucking company is already on the list under a slightly different name ("J&B Transport LLC" vs "JB Transport"). Now you've got two rows for one carrier, a vendor nobody vetted, and an approved list you can't trust.

In a lot of logistics teams, "adding a carrier" is whoever-has-the-spreadsheet-open. There's no real request, no second set of eyes from compliance, and no record of who added a carrier or why. Duplicates pile up. Carriers that should never have been approved slip in. And when something goes wrong on a load, you can't show how that carrier got onto the list in the first place.

This tool replaces the free-for-all with a clean request-and-approve workflow - and a duplicate check that catches the same carrier no matter how its name is spelled.

What you'll build

A small internal web app, just for your team, that:

• Lets a requester submit a new-carrier request: the carrier's details (MC#, DOT#, name), the lanes they'd cover, and the reason they're needed.
• Runs an automatic duplicate check against your existing carrier master - matching on MC/DOT number and on a normalized name (so "J&B Transport LLC" and "JB Transport" get flagged as the same carrier) - and warns before anything goes to review.
• Routes the request to compliance / a manager to review and approve or reject, with a comment.
• Enforces segregation of duties - the person who requested a carrier can't be the one who approves it.
• On approval, adds the carrier to the approved-vendor list and notifies the requester; on rejection, tells them why.
• Keeps a complete audit trail of every request, duplicate flag, decision, and addition.
• Works entirely off a CSV of your carrier master today, and exports a clean approved-vendor CSV in the columns your TMS or ERP expects.

What's inside the Implementation Plan

The plan is a single markdown file you paste into Claude Code (a free AI coding agent). It walks the agent through building the whole tool, step by step, each step ending with a ready-to-paste prompt.

The most important part: the plan opens by interviewing you about your business. Before it writes a single line, the agent asks how carriers get added today, what your carrier master actually looks like (the exact MC/DOT and name columns and how they're formatted), who's allowed to request versus approve, how you describe lanes, what compliance checks before approving, and your messy edge cases (carriers with no MC#, name changes, brokers vs asset carriers, reactivating an old one). It reads a short tailored spec back to you, you confirm it, and only then does it build - so you get a tool shaped to your carrier process, not a generic template you have to bend to fit.

Inside you'll find:

• The discovery interview and how the agent turns your answers into the data model and the duplicate-matching rules.
• The full build: database, login, the carrier-master import, the requester form, the duplicate check on MC/DOT + normalized name, the compliance review screen, the approval gate with segregation of duties, the notifications, and the audit trail.
• Verification steps so you can prove it works, and the CSV-import / CSV-export fallback so it's fully usable even before you connect it to your TMS.

The governance it includes (this is the point)

This isn't a toy. The plan builds in the controls a logistics and compliance team actually needs:

• Login so only your team can see or touch anything.
• Row-level security so people only see the requests and carriers that belong to your organization.
• A complete audit trail - every request, duplicate flag, approval, rejection, and addition is logged with who and when.
• A hard human-in-the-loop gate - the app drafts and checks, but a real compliance reviewer must approve before any carrier reaches the approved list; nothing is auto-approved.
• Segregation of duties enforced in code - the requester can never approve their own request.
• Duplicate guards - the same carrier can't be added twice, matched on MC/DOT number and a normalized name.

Who it's for

Procurement requesters who need new carriers approved, and the compliance leads or managers who own the approved-vendor list - in 3PLs, brokerages, shippers, and any ops/BPM team that's tired of a messy, unvetted carrier roster and wants a real, auditable approval workflow without hiring a developer or buying a heavyweight TMS module. You don't need to write code. You need your carrier master CSV, a list of who requests and who approves, and an afternoon.

You've got this - paste the first prompt and let the agent interview you.