Not a tool your team has to learn. A small machine that takes one recurring job off their desk and gives it back to you as time.
RFQs arriving as emailed PDFs, drawings and spec sheets, each formatted however the customer felt like formatting it.
Someone opens every email, works out what it is, decides which machine and which estimator it belongs to, and re-keys it. At volume that is a person’s morning, every morning. And quoting turnaround decides won work.
New customers email their requests as prose — sometimes with PDF specs attached, sometimes describing the problem in plain text. Someone reads each one, figures out what's being asked, and routes it to the right salesperson, engineer, or project lead.
Every quote is a one-off document. The salesperson opens the template, copies the last similar quote, edits the line items, checks pricing in a separate list or email thread, and recalculates the totals by hand. Errors in totals occasionally get sent out.
When a customer accepts a quote, someone re-keys the line items, prices, and delivery details into the ERP to generate the sales order. The information already exists in the quote document but there's no link between the two systems.
New work requests arrive across email, WhatsApp photos, phone calls, web forms — and no single inbox owns them. Someone re-types each one into the planning system every morning; occasionally a job falls through the cracks.
Clients, suppliers, and third parties email documents tied to a project — plans, certificates, invoices, reports — into a shared inbox. Someone opens each one, identifies the project code, and files the attachment by hand. When volume is high, filing lags or gets skipped.
The number that decides all of this is your volume. Everything else on this page is a guess until I know it.
A machine reads one document in about 40 seconds, for roughly ten cents, scanned or digital, and gets close to zero fields wrong. A person takes between two and ten minutes, and the error rate climbs when they are tired. That is the cost per RFQ.
Pre-production. Real numbers.
I have built exactly this intake for a sixty-person fabricator, where job orders arrived as WhatsApp photos and emailed PDFs scattered across several inboxes.
I have built satellite software, and B2B systems used by around 50,000 people a month, where a bug means a payment does not clear.
The same engineering, pointed at a sixty-person shop. What changes is the ceremony, not the quality.
30 minutes, free. You tell me how many come through in a week. I tell you whether a machine can take it off your desk, what it would take to build, and what it would cost. If it isn't worth building, I say so on the call.
Let's talk