Solution
Automated quote creation
Enquiries arriving by email or form are read, matched against items and customer terms in the ERP and presented as a finished draft quote. Your sales team checks and approves it. The quote goes out the same day instead of a week later.
Who it is for: For manufacturing, wholesale and trades businesses with many similar enquiries and pricing logic held in the ERP.
Starting point
How the process runs today
An enquiry comes in, often with a bill of materials as a PDF or Excel file. Sales support looks up item numbers, checks availability, finds the customer's prices and assembles the quote in the ERP or in Word. Queries go back and forth by email. Whoever quotes first often wins the order, and that is exactly where the time is lost.
What it costs
- Enquiries sit untouched when the person responsible is away.
- Prices and discounts are taken from memory or from old quotes.
- The technical knowledge needed to match items sits with a few people.
- Nobody knows how many enquiries have gone unanswered.
Process
What the process looks like afterwards
01
Enquiry
An email, form or uploaded bill of materials is captured automatically.
02
Extraction
The AI identifies line items, quantities, dates and the customer.
03
Matching
Items, availability and customer terms are looked up in the ERP.
04
Draft
The quote is produced in your layout, with uncertain points flagged.
05
Approval
Sales checks the draft, adds to it and approves it.
06
Dispatch
The quote goes to the customer and is filed in the ERP or CRM.
Integrations
Which systems are connected
Prices and terms are always read from the system of record. The finished quote is created there as a document, so that the order and invoice can follow from it.
- ERP and accounting
- Abacus
- SAP Business One
- Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central
- proALPHA
- bexio
- CRM and communication
- HubSpot
- Calendar and collaboration
- Microsoft 365
- AI and automation
- Claude
Make or buy
Off-the-shelf or custom?
Off-the-shelf software is enough if
- Your quotes consist of a few standard line items.
- Enquiries already arrive in structured form through a form or a shop.
- You write fewer than 20 quotes a month.
Finished products for this case: bexio, Abacus and most ERP systems create quotes from templates. CPQ tools cover complex configurations.
Custom is worth it if
- Enquiries arrive unstructured as emails, PDFs or Excel files.
- Line items have to be matched to items, which takes specialist knowledge.
- Customer-specific prices, volume tiers and lead times have to be taken into account.
- Speed decides who wins the order.
Effort
Price range and duration
- Price range
- CHF 20'000 to 50'000
- Duration
- 6 to 12 weeks
Non-binding estimate, excl. VAT.
What drives the effort
The key factors are the quality of your item master data, the variety of enquiries and the interface to the ERP.
The price becomes binding after the fixed-price discovery phase.
Your case in numbers
- Hours per year tied up
- 560
- Cost per year today
- CHF 39'200
- Possible saving per year
- CHF 23'500
336 hours freed up for other work
Rough calculation based on your figures. Not a quote.
Automated quote creation
Frequently asked questions
How does the system know our prices and discounts?
From your ERP or your price list. Items, customer terms and volume prices are queried directly and are not estimated by the AI. The AI only reads the enquiry and matches the line items.
Does a quote go to the customer without being checked?
No, unless you want that for clearly defined standard cases. Normally your sales team receives a finished draft with the uncertain points flagged, and either approves it with one click or adjusts it.
How do you stop the AI from making mistakes?
By never letting it decide alone where mistakes are expensive. Every extraction is given a confidence score, uncertain cases go to a person for approval, and every decision is logged. Before go-live we measure the accuracy rate on your real data.
Let us talk about your case.
20 minutes are enough to find out whether a custom solution is worth it for you.