Quote turnaround from 3 days to 40 minutes
Intake, pricing rules, and approvals rebuilt as one automated path with a complete audit trail — and a quoting application the sales team now runs the business from.
Where they were
A $180M distributor was losing bids to competitors who answered faster, not cheaper.
RFQs came in as email attachments in every format imaginable and were rekeyed by hand into an 80-tab pricing workbook maintained by one person nearing retirement.
Approvals happened over email with no tracking, and roughly one quote a week was simply lost.
What we did
01Mapped the real process first
Two weeks of shadowing produced a diagram of what actually happened to an RFQ — including three informal steps that weren't in any documentation and one that existed only to satisfy a customer who had left in 2021.
02Extracted pricing into a versioned rules engine
The workbook's logic was ported to explicit, dated rules with a dry-run preview. Sales can now see which rule produced any number on a quote, which turned out to matter more for trust than the speed did.
03Automated intake with a human checkpoint
Attachments are parsed into structured line items with per-field confidence. Anything uncertain is flagged rather than guessed — the team trusts it because it admits when it doesn't know.
04Put approvals where the work happens
Threshold-based routing with one-click approval from Slack, and a permanent record. Median approval time went from 14 hours to 25 minutes.
“We expected software. What we got first was a map of our own business that we didn't have, and honestly that was worth the engagement on its own.”
What it was built with
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