Use case
Quoting is usually slow for two reasons: the pricing logic lives in someone's head, and approval requires a person who is busy. Both are addressable, and the first must be settled before the second.
The visible symptom is rarely the cause. These are the underlying reasons we find most often.
Standard quotes are produced in minutes and consistently, with human attention reserved for the ones that genuinely need judgement.
How we solve it
Eight to sixteen weeks, longer where pricing logic is complex or genuinely undocumented.
Rules, exceptions and the discretion that genuinely needs to remain. Undocumented pricing is the actual constraint, and writing it down often reveals inconsistencies worth more than the speed gain.
One source for products, prices and rules. Quoting from scattered sources is why the same job gets two answers.
Assemble from structured inputs rather than editing last month's file. This removes the error class where an old client's name survives into a new quote.
Standard quotes issue immediately; only genuine exceptions route to a person. Approving everything individually is what makes one person the bottleneck.
How it works
A process before and after automation
Before: five steps, four of them manual. After: the same outcome with one human decision point and a defined exception path for when the system is unsure.
Capabilities
Context
In competitive situations the first credible quote often sets the terms of the comparison, and a quote that takes four days competes against one that arrived on the same afternoon.
Complexity is usually the reason to do it rather than not to. What blocks automation is undocumented complexity: rules that exist only as judgement. Once written down, most of it is codifiable and the genuine exceptions are a small minority.
No, if discretion is designed in. Automate the standard path and route the exceptions to a person with the context attached. That is more flexibility than a process where everything waits behind one approver.
Quoting is usually slow for two reasons: the pricing logic lives in someone's head, and approval requires a person who is busy. Both are addressable, and the first must be settled before the second.
In competitive situations the first credible quote often sets the terms of the comparison, and a quote that takes four days competes against one that arrived on the same afternoon.
Quotes take days and the delay is mostly waiting; Two people quoting the same job produce different numbers; Errors in quotes are found after they have been sent; and Approval sits with one person and stops when they are away
Pricing rules are undocumented and applied by judgement; Every quote is assembled by hand from a previous one; Approval thresholds have never been defined, so everything is approved individually; and Product, pricing and discount data live in separate places
Standard quotes are produced in minutes and consistently, with human attention reserved for the ones that genuinely need judgement.
Eight to sixteen weeks, longer where pricing logic is complex or genuinely undocumented.
Connected
If the before state above reads like your operation, the next step is establishing which part of it is actually costing you. Describe it and we will tell you where speed up quoting would and would not help.
