Your quotes take 5 days. Your competitor's take 2. You're losing bids you should win.
Manufacturers that respond to RFQs within 2 days win 35% of bids. Those taking 5+ days win 12%. Same quality, same price — the difference is response time.
Your estimator reads an incoming RFQ. They dig through old quotes for similar work. Cross-check pricing, margins, material costs, customer-specific terms. Format it into your quote template. Send it back.
For each RFQ this takes 3-7 days. During that time your customer is waiting — often also waiting on 2-3 competitors. Whoever responds first with a credible quote wins disproportionately.
What you've probably already tried
- Generic CPQ software. Doesn't know your customers, materials, or past jobs. Your estimator still rebuilds most of the quote.
- Hiring another estimator. Expensive, slow to train. Bottleneck returns in six months.
- Quote templates. Save time on formatting. Don't speed up the estimation work that actually takes days.
The cost of doing nothing
- Lost bids on work you could have won.
- Estimator burnout — the single point of failure in every SME manufacturer.
- Customer frustration: slow quotes signal a slow operation.
- Margin erosion when quotes are rushed to hit deadlines.
Watch the system process a mock RFQ end to end.
A custom Quoting Agent trained on your historical quotes, drawings, pricing, and past job outcomes. When an RFQ arrives, the system extracts structured data, retrieves the most similar historical quotes, drafts a line-item quote against your schema, hands it to your estimator in a review UI, and pushes the approved quote back into your ERP.
Your estimator becomes a reviewer, not a data-entry operator. They adjust what they disagree with. They approve. Quote out the door in hours, not days.
The 5-step delivery
- 01Discover — current quote cycle, estimator workflow, bottleneck mapping.
- 02Map— decisions made, inputs that matter, what's throwaway.
- 03Prepare data — ingest historical quotes, clean pricing, tag won/lost outcomes. 60% of project time.
- 04Add intelligence — RAG layer, drafting model, schema validation.
- 05Build software — review UI and ERP integration.
The Swedish government covers 75% of your investment, up to 150,000 SEK. No board approval required.
Swedish contract manufacturers and industrial subcontractors. 20–100 employees. RFQ-heavy workflows. SNI C:10–33.
“Our historical quote data is messy.”
Expected. Data preparation is 60% of every engagement — already priced in. If the data is worse than expected, we tell you in week 2 and adjust scope together.
“Our estimator will hate this.”
Only if you sell it as replacement. The review UI keeps the estimator as the decider. AI drafts. They adjust. They approve. Most estimators want this after seeing week 1.
“Our ERP is niche.”
Integration surface varies — Monitor, Garp, Pyramid, Hogia, bespoke. We scope conservatively. Worst case: standalone review UI alongside your ERP, with proper integration in phase 2.
“What if it doesn't work?”
The 4-week checkpoint is binary. If drafted quotes aren't useful, we kill the project. You don't pay the final milestone on a system that doesn't work.
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