Five-minute quotes for an industrial manufacturer
Industrial manufacturer
- <5 minFrom RFQ to a complete draft proposal, down from two weeks
- ~88%Less effort per quote, from four days of work to half a day
- $18.4MAdditional revenue a year from a 12.5-point increase in close rate
- $8.8MValue a year of the quoting capacity freed
Summary
An industrial manufacturer used Bourne to build a quoting agent. It turns an RFQ into a complete draft proposal in under five minutes, where a quote used to take two weeks.
Problem
The company sells engineered equipment and spare parts to industrial customers. Its sales team assembled every quote by hand from the ERP, the CRM, reporting dashboards, pricing tools and local Excel files, and inputs from other regions arrived by email.
A standard quote took two weeks. In one case, a unit-of-measure mismatch priced a washer worth $20 to $50 at $57,000.
Solution
The company used Bourne to build a quoting agent. When an RFQ arrives, the agent reads the parts list, matches each line against master pricing and past proposals, applies the company’s commercial rules and fills in lead times from past orders. The rep gets back a complete, branded proposal to review.
Any line the agent cannot price with confidence goes to a named person with the evidence attached, and the answer becomes context for the next quote. The first version worked from the exports the team already used, so security review did not hold up the first result.
| Work | Before | With Bourne |
|---|---|---|
| RFQ to draft proposal | Built by hand across five systems, taking two weeks. | A complete, branded draft in under five minutes. |
| Effort per quote | Four days of a rep's work. | Half a day, mostly review. |
| Lines that cannot be priced | Chased over email, with errors like a $57,000 washer. | Sent to a named person with the evidence attached, and the answer is reused next time. |
Impact
Each quote now takes half a day of work instead of four days. At 350 quotes a month, that frees about 9,800 hours a month. At a fully loaded $75 an hour, we project that capacity is worth $8.8M a year.
Faster responses are projected to raise the close rate by 12.5 percentage points. On 4,200 quotes a year at an average quote value of $35,000, that is about 525 more orders and $18.4M in additional revenue a year.
What’s next
The company is now growing the quoting agent into an operating system for its whole customer lifecycle. It will act across the company’s ERP, manufacturing and service systems, and the team can change it quickly as the business changes.
