Quoting engine for made-to-order steel fabrication

A made-to-order steel fabricator relied on one senior estimator to price every job. Quotes took up to two days, and the business could not grow past what one person could estimate.

We built a quoting engine that captures the estimator's pricing rules, tested it against three years of past quotes, and now returns a priced quote in about four minutes. The project took nine weeks.

Pricing a fabrication job means steel weight and grade, cutting, drilling, welding, finishing, labour and delivery. Twenty years of judgement on all of that lived in one estimator's head.

Customers wanted faster answers, the estimator was the bottleneck, and the business needed confidence that an automated price would be as good as his before it went near a customer.

We sat with the estimator and modelled his rules for material, cutting, fabrication, finishing and margins. Then we replayed three years of real quotes through the model and tuned it until it matched his judgement.

The quoting engine now builds a price from the job spec, shows the breakdown line by line, and flags anything unusual for the estimator to check. Quote turnaround went from two days to four minutes.