Case study · Manufacturer · Southern California
One consistent way to quote jobs at a family-owned manufacturer
As on-demand CTO for a new operations system, we designed how estimates and pricing work and used AI to convert years of old estimates, so the team quotes from the same data.
- Business
- Manufacturer · Southern California
- The problem
- Every estimator priced jobs a little differently.
- The result
- Three years of estimates converted into one consistent quoting data set.
- Services
- On-Demand CTO, Knowledge Capture and Handover
The situation
Every estimator priced jobs a little differently.
A family-owned manufacturer was moving to a new operations system. Quoting was the sticking point: estimates lived in individual spreadsheets and in the heads of a few experienced people, each of whom priced jobs slightly differently.
Three years of past estimates held exactly the knowledge the new system needed, but in a mix of formats nobody had time to go through by hand.
What we did
Four steps, in order.
- Step 01
As On-Demand CTO for the operations system project, owned the plan, the vendor and the budget.
- Step 02
Designed how estimates and pricing work in the new system, with the estimators as the experts.
- Step 03
Used AI to read three years of old estimates in their various formats and convert them into one structured data set, checked by the people who wrote them.
- Step 04
Loaded the converted estimates into the new system and trained the team to quote from it.
What changed
Three years of estimates converted into one consistent quoting data set.
- One way to quote a job, used by everyone, instead of one per estimator.
- The knowledge of the experienced estimators is in the system rather than only in their heads.
What the team uses now
The team quotes from the new operations system using the same data. We continue as On-Demand CTO, a few days a month, with the next AI projects on the plan.
The services behind it
The same steps, available for your business.
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