From Enquiry to Commissioned Solution

The Challenge

The business won complex, bespoke engineering contracts but its quoting and estimation process was entirely manual. Each estimator worked from their own spreadsheets, pulling figures from memory and past projects they happened to recall. There was no structured way to capture or reuse prior work. When senior estimators were unavailable, turnaround times blew out significantly. Rework was common, and quote quality varied widely across the team.

The Solution

We built a questionnaire-driven configurator platform that guided estimators through a structured scoping process and automatically assembled a solution from a knowledge base of pre-approved components, rates, and configurations. An AI layer enriched the output by surfacing relevant historical estimates and flagging scope gaps before submission.

• •Structured questionnaire capturing scope, site conditions, and client requirements
• •Automated component and rate selection from a governed knowledge base
• •AI-assisted similarity matching against historical estimates
• •Integrated approval workflow from estimate through to customer quote
• •Live dashboard tracking enquiry pipeline, conversion rates, and margin by solution type

The Outcome

Estimate turnaround dropped from 20 days to 5, and quote-to-order from 45 days to 15. Knowledge reuse across estimates rose from 5% to 85% — meaning the majority of each new estimate was built from validated prior work rather than constructed from scratch. Junior estimators could now produce commercially sound quotes independently, removing the bottleneck on senior staff and increasing the team's overall throughput significantly.