The Hire Decision in 90 Seconds

The Company

Veltri Structures hires out construction equipment across Emilia-Romagna and into Tuscany. Their main business is cranes — tower cranes, mobile cranes, a few smaller picks — and they've got 34 units in the fleet. Some are long-term site contracts that run for months. Others come back in for two or three weeks between jobs. They're a Bologna family business, about 60 people, and they've been doing this long enough that most of their customers call before they look anywhere else.

The Pain

Matteo runs operations. When an enquiry comes in — a contractor asking for a 40-tonne mobile crane in Modena from mid-February — he needs to know quickly whether they can actually do it. The problem is the fleet tracker lives in a Google Sheet that he and one other person built over three years. It's got conditional formatting, merged cells, a tab for service windows, another tab for provisional holds. Matteo can read it fast. Almost nobody else can. So when he's on a site visit or just away from his desk, enquiries sit. And even when he is at his desk, working out whether a unit is genuinely free — not just unbooked, but available after its service interval, not already pencilled in for another job — takes him a while. He does it in his head, cross-referencing two tabs. He's done it hundreds of times. It's still slow.

The Move

He pastes two things into Claude: the text of the enquiry email, and the contents of the availability sheet. Then he runs a standing prompt he's written once and saved — something like: "Here's a hire enquiry and our current fleet sheet. Tell me which units could cover this, flag any utilisation or service conflicts, and draft a first reply I can send to the customer."

Claude comes back with a short structured summary. Nearest suitable unit, when it's free, anything that looks like a clash. A draft reply the customer could actually receive. Matteo reads it, adjusts if needed, and sends. The whole thing takes a few minutes instead of twenty. He's not waiting until he's back at his desk with both tabs open and enough headspace to hold it all at once.

The blind spot

The sheet is the problem, right? It's messy, only two people understand it, someone should rebuild it properly. So the move feels like a workaround rather than a real fix, and Matteo keeps meaning to sort the sheet out first. But the sheet isn't getting rebuilt anytime soon, and meanwhile enquiries still need answering. This works on the sheet exactly as it is.

The pattern

The same move fits in a lot of places where someone's sitting on structured information and getting asked questions about it regularly:

• A logistics manager pasting a driver rota and a late-delivery report into Claude to work out what to say to an angry client
• An events hire company doing the same with their inventory sheet when a venue asks for a custom package quote
• A small manufacturer checking whether they can take on a rush order by dropping their current production schedule into the same kind of prompt