An industrial distributor turns quotes around in under an hour instead of a day.

A group selling and servicing industrial components through branches and field teams in more than twenty countries, with a catalogue of several hundred thousand parts. Its customers run plants and infrastructure. When a machine stops, the supplier who answers first usually wins the order.

1. IndustryGlobal industrial distribution and service
2. FunctionSell and Serve: customer inbox through to order
3. ScopeShared mailboxes across the group's branches, in several languages
4. SystemsTwo systems of record from different eras, connected and left in place

We put an operating layer between the shared mailbox and the two systems of record. It reads each request, identifies the account and the part, and drafts the reply with live stock, contract price and dispatch cut-off drawn from the client's own data. Nothing is estimated. One request, taken from the system running today:

1. 01

   Identifies the account and the part

   The sender is matched to their contract terms, location, credit position and order history. The described part is narrowed by meaning to the item this account has bought eleven times before.

2. 02

   Pulls the facts from the systems of record

   Live stock, the contracted price and today's dispatch cut-off, each shown with its source.

3. 03

   Decides whether it is certain enough

   Clean answers, and it drafts. An ambiguous description, stock split across sites or a price off contract, and it hands the email to the right person with the research done. It never guesses at a price or a date.

4. 04

   Drafts, and learns from the edit

   In the customer's language and the company's voice. A person reads it and clicks send. Whatever they change feeds back in.

Elapsed: about nine seconds.

From quoting to order placement. Once quoting had proved itself in the numbers, the same layer was extended to the next step. When a customer accepts a quote or sends a purchase order, the system reads it, matches it line by line to the quote and the account, and places the order in the system of record. A person approves anything that does not match. Order placement had been the largest block of manual work after quoting, and automating it freed a further 30% of the team's capacity.

1. Routine requests answered without a person drafting: 80%+Specialists read and send. They no longer research and write.
2. Quote turnaround: under an hour, from same day at bestIn a market where the first answer usually wins the order.
3. Order placement automated: a further 30% of capacity freedAccepted quotes and purchase orders go into the system of record without re-keying. The time released has gone into outbound sales, so the same team now calls customers instead of only answering them.
4. Every quote followed upQuotes that go quiet are chased on schedule, recovering business that had been won and then forgotten.
5. Rolling out across more than twenty countriesThe same layer is now moving further down the order cycle: purchasing and stock, invoicing, cash. Each function is committed on the strength of the previous one's numbers, not a slide.

How it is built: inside the client's own cloud, in their own region. No copy on our side, named and revocable access, and audit logs held by the client, under a signed data protection agreement.