Start with the specification
Create guided enquiry forms by product family. Ask for dimensions, quantities, tolerances and supporting files only when they are relevant.
MANUFACTURINGILLUSTRATIVE CASE STUDY
From scattered enquiries to one production-ready brief.
A connected enquiry-to-quotation workflow for a manufacturer with complex product specifications.
Software & AIThe business challenge.
A growing manufacturer receives enquiries through email, phone calls and distributor messages. Specifications arrive in different formats. Sales asks engineering the same questions, and estimating starts before the brief is complete.
How could the business turn an incomplete enquiry into a usable quotation request without adding another layer of administration?
The insight behind the approach.
The bottleneck is not simply quotation speed. It is the quality of the information available when estimating begins. The experience should help the customer supply the right details and show the team what is still missing.
The proposed solution.
Give the team a shared record
Bring requests into a role-based workspace with ownership, status, clarification history and versioned attachments.
Assist, then review
Use AI to suggest extracted details from incoming documents. Highlight uncertainty and require a person to confirm the specification before it reaches estimating.
Proposed scope
- Customer enquiry experience
- Internal quotation workspace
- CRM integration
- Document extraction with review
- Status notifications
What success would need to show.
These are proposed measures, not reported results. A real engagement would establish a baseline and agree targets before implementation.
- Enquiry completeness
- Share of requests ready for estimating without another clarification round.
- Time to first quotation
- Median elapsed time from a complete brief to a first quotation.
- Rework
- Requests returned to sales because of missing or conflicting specifications.
THE TAKEAWAY