Belvoir machines low-volume precision components, and won most of the work it quoted for. The problem was how little it quoted for. A request for pricing took nine working days on average, passed through three spreadsheets and one estimator who had been there since 1998, and around a fifth of requests were abandoned by the customer before an answer arrived. Sales had stopped chasing smaller enquiries entirely.
We spent two weeks on the shop floor before proposing anything. The estimator was not slow; he was reconstructing a pricing model from memory on every single request, because none of it had ever been written down. We captured that model as rules, tested it against 400 historical quotes, and found it agreed with him on 91 per cent of them without any adjustment at all.
The new tool prices a standard job in minutes and routes the genuinely unusual ones to a human with the reasoning already assembled. Turnaround fell below a day. More importantly the small enquiries came back, and they converted better than the large ones the sales team had been protecting. Belvoir now quotes roughly three times the volume with the same four people.