Automatically generated quotes: what the software really does and what stays with you

A quote generator automates three steps out of five. It reads the customer's request and extracts what is needed, compares it with jobs you have already done, and puts the document together. What stays with you are the two things that matter most: deciding the price and deciding whether you want that job at all.

This is the real scope, and it is narrower than the way it gets told. It is worth looking at step by step, because that is where you see whether it pays off.

The three steps the software does

Reading the request. An email arrives with a drawing attached, or a message describing a job in words, or a bill of materials file. The first task is to pull out of it the information needed to quote: material, quantity, tolerances, treatment, requested lead times. It is the step where most time is lost today, and the one where a language model performs best, because it is exactly the task it was made for: take a disorderly text and return orderly fields.

Finding the precedent. The second thing it does is search, among the jobs already quoted, for those similar enough to serve as a reference. It is not a search by word: it is by similarity of characteristics. If you have ten years of quotes on file, the precedent almost always exists, and until now it was in somebody's head.

Putting the document together. The third step is the most banal and the most thankless: assembling line items, terms, delivery times, notes and clauses into a presentable document. Nobody misses it.

If you want to know how much of your quoting falls into these three steps, write to us: half an hour and the way you work today are enough.

The two steps that stay with you, and why

The price. A model knows what you charged in the past. It does not know that this customer is behind on payments, that this month your shop floor is running light, that you want this order because it opens a sector for you, or that on this material the supplier has just raised your terms. Price is a commercial decision that uses cost as one of its ingredients, and cost is the only piece that can be calculated.

Anyone promising the automatic price is promising that your commercial decisions are a function of your historical data. In contract manufacturing they almost never are.

The choice of whether to quote at all. The second thing that stays with a person is saying no. A quote made for a job you do not want is time lost twice, and judging which requests deserve an answer is the hardest part to put into a system, because the real criteria are often written down nowhere.

How to tell whether your way of quoting is suited to it

Three questions, and they can be answered without opening any software.

Are past quotes findable? Having them is not enough. They have to be readable by a program: with line items separated, the material in one field, the quantities in another. If they are PDFs scattered across folders and email attachments, the first job is not artificial intelligence, it is tidying up. It is a job that can be done, and it belongs in the quote for what it is.

This is not a fixation of ours: among Italian companies that assessed artificial intelligence without then investing in it, the unavailability or poor quality of the necessary data is the third declared obstacle, at 45.2 per cent, according to the Imprese e ICT survey by the Italian national statistics institute ISTAT, 2025 edition, on 26,246 companies with at least ten employees.

Do requests all arrive the same way? If they come by email, through the customer's portal, by phone and in a messaging group, there is not one point of entry, and every extra channel is extra work. It is better to start from one, the most frequent.

How many hours do you really spend on it? The number you need is not how long quoting takes in total, but how long the repetitive part takes: reading, looking for the precedent, laying it out. That is the only part that gets automated, so it is the only one on which the return can be estimated. If you do not know, measuring it for two weeks costs little and is worth more than any supplier's quote.

What changes on the shop floor

The real change is not speed: it is that quotes become comparable.

When every request travels the same path and produces documents with the same structure, for the first time you can look back and see which jobs you win, at what price, and which ones you always lose. It is a side effect, and in several companies it counts for more than the time saved.

The other change is less pleasant and should be said: the system brings inconsistencies to the surface. Two nearly identical quotes made to two different customers at different prices used to be invisible. Afterwards, they are not.

The job to start from

The most frequent one, and among the frequent ones the one for which you have the most precedents on file. A scope of this kind sits within the order of magnitude of the entry-level engagement, between 5,000 and 10,000 euros, and it is the only one on which it can be said in advance whether it is worth it, because you already have the term of comparison in hours.

If you want to see where your case falls, write to us. Half an hour is enough.