Automated Quotes for Manufacturers: How to Automate Quoting in Your ERP

Automated quotes are quotes drafted in your ERP from a customer's request for quote (RFQ) without anyone retyping it. The software reads the RFQ, finds the customer, the parts, the quantities and the units, prices each line from your price lists or pricing rules, and leaves a quote for a person to check and send. For manufacturers the phrase covers three different kinds of software, and the one you need depends on where your quoting time actually goes.

This guide explains the three, walks through the quoting process step by step, shows where automation applies at each step, lists the common failure points and says what to measure. Fluent is one of the options; we have tried to be fair.

What people mean by automated quotes

• CPQ and product configurators. Configure, price, quote (CPQ) software holds the rules for a configurable product: which options go together, what each one costs, and what the bill of materials looks like. A salesperson, dealer or customer answers questions, and the rules produce a buildable configuration and a price. Examples are Epicor CPQ (formerly KBMax), Tacton CPQ, Salesforce Revenue Cloud, DriveWorks (for SOLIDWORKS) and Configure One. Epicor Kinetic also has its own product configurator, used from Quote Entry and Order Entry.
• Estimating and quoting tools for job shops. Built for shops that make parts to the customer's drawing. They read the 3D model or the drawing, estimate material, machine time and outside processing, and apply your pricing rules. Examples are Paperless Parts and the estimating and quoting module of job-shop ERPs such as ProShop.
• Quote entry automation. Software that reads RFQs as they arrive (email bodies, PDFs, spreadsheets, Word files, scans) and drafts the quote in the ERP's own quote screen: the customer, the parts including the customer's own part numbers, the quantities, the units of measure and the prices from your price lists. It holds no product rules of its own: where a part is configurable, the ERP's own configurator still decides. It removes the reading and typing between the RFQ and the quote. Fluent works here, and on Epicor Kinetic it also answers the product configurator from the request.

Most manufacturers need one or two of these, rarely all three. A company that sells catalogue and repeat parts in volume gets little from a configurator, because there is nothing to configure. A company that sells engineered-to-order machines gets little from faster data entry until its configuration rules live somewhere other than an engineer's head. Sort a month of your own RFQs before choosing.

Comparison table

The quoting process, step by step

Whatever the product, a quote moves through the same six steps. The time is rarely in the pricing decision itself. It goes into finding things, matching them and typing them.

1. Receive the RFQ

RFQs arrive as emails, PDF forms, spreadsheets of line items, drawings, scans and photos, or as a call a rep writes up. They land in shared inboxes and personal ones. The first delay is often just noticing that one arrived and deciding who owns it. A shared address that is watched, with every RFQ logged at the time it was received, fixes most of this, and that timestamp is where turnaround time starts.

2. Identify the customer

The requester has to be matched to a customer record in the ERP, with the right ship-to and contact. A new prospect needs a record before a quote can exist. Mistakes here, such as two records for one company or a parent picked instead of a subsidiary, carry through to pricing and terms.

3. Resolve the parts

This is usually the largest share of the work. Customers ask for parts by their own part numbers, by description, or by drawing number. Someone has to translate each line to your part number and revision, often by searching the customer part cross-reference, past orders and past quotes. Lines that are not standard parts go to engineering or estimating, which is where configurators and job-shop estimating tools earn their keep.

4. Enter quantities and units of measure

An RFQ may ask for 500 feet, 3 rolls or 12 boxes of 100. Each quantity has to be entered in the unit the customer asked for, or the quote prices the wrong amount. Many RFQs ask for several quantities per line so the customer can see the price breaks.

5. Price each line

Prices come from price lists, customer-specific prices, quantity breaks, cost-plus rules or an estimate. For standard parts this should be a lookup the ERP already does. For configured or build-to-print parts it is the work of a configurator or an estimator.

6. Review, send and follow up

Someone checks the quote, sends it and records the outcome. When the customer accepts, the quote becomes a sales order, and the customer's purchase order should be checked against what was quoted.

Where automation applies at each step

Common failure points

• The wrong customer record. Duplicate and parent or subsidiary accounts give a quote the wrong prices and terms. Automation should say which record it matched and stop when it is unsure.
• Customer part numbers that do not resolve. A missing cross-reference entry is the most common reason a line gets the wrong part. A wrong match is worse than no match: the line should come back unresolved, with what was searched.
• Unit of measure mix-ups. Feet against inches, each against box. Quantities have to be loaded in the unit the RFQ states and converted by the ERP, never assumed.
• Prices typed over the price list. Hand-typed prices drift away from the price list. Let the ERP price the line and flag every difference from what the customer expects.
• RFQs that sit in an inbox. No owner, no timestamp and no follow-up means lost business nobody sees.
• Quotes that are retyped into orders. When the order is keyed again from the purchase order instead of coming from the quote, the agreed prices and parts get lost.

What to measure

• Quote turnaround time. Time from the RFQ arriving to the quote being sent. Track the median and the slowest 10%, by customer and by type of quote, since one average hides the backlog.
• Win rate. Quotes that become orders, by count and by value. Segment it by customer and product family so that a change in mix does not hide the effect of faster quotes.
• Quote accuracy. The share of quotes sent without a correction, and the share of orders whose part, unit or price differs from the quote they came from.
• Touch time per quote. Minutes of staff time per quote, measured apart from waiting time. This is what automation reduces most directly.
• Open RFQs. RFQs received but not yet quoted at the end of each day.

Measure these for a few weeks before changing anything, so you have a baseline to compare against.

Where Fluent fits, and where it does not

Fluent's Quote Entry agent is quote entry automation for Epicor Kinetic. It reads RFQs as they arrive (PDFs, scans, photos, spreadsheets, Word files and email bodies) and drafts the quote in Quote Entry. It resolves the customer, the parts (including the customer's own part numbers, through the customer part cross-reference and that customer's past orders and quotes), the units as the RFQ states them, and the part revisions against live Epicor data. Each line is priced by Epicor itself, from your price lists, so the quote carries the prices the ERP would give.

Nothing reaches Epicor until a person reviews the draft and processes it. A customer or a part that cannot be matched is left on the draft with the reason and what was searched, and every field read and every decision is recorded on the document. Fluent connects to Kinetic's REST API from outside, so nothing is installed inside Epicor: no customization, no BPM and no import file. There are no templates per customer and no field mapping; behaviour is set with written instructions, and corrections become instructions.

Where a line is a configurable part, Fluent works the Epicor product configurator: it answers the configurator's questions from the request and reads the configured price back onto the line, so the price comes from Epicor's own rules. Where it does not fit: Fluent is not a CPQ. It has no rules engine of its own, does not design products, and does not estimate cost from a 3D model. If your configuration rules are not in Epicor yet, or dealers and customers need a visual configurator, a CPQ such as Epicor CPQ or Tacton CPQ is the right tool. If it goes into costing build-to-print parts from drawings, look at Paperless Parts or your job-shop ERP's estimating module. Fluent fits when the time goes into reading RFQs and entering them in Quote Entry, configured lines included, and it can sit alongside a CPQ.

When the customer accepts, the quote becomes a sales order in Epicor. Fluent's Order Entry agent reads the customer's purchase order in whatever format it arrives, resolves the customer, ship-to, customer part numbers, units and prices, and flags duplicate POs. The guide on how to automate Epicor sales order entry covers that step.

The same agents are offered for other ERPs, including Epicor Prophet 21, SAP Business One, Oracle NetSuite, Acumatica and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central. Epicor Kinetic is where Fluent is deepest.

How to start

• Sort a month of RFQs. Split them into standard and repeat parts, configured products and build-to-print work. The split tells you which kind of automation pays.
• Take a baseline. Measure turnaround time, touch time and win rate before changing anything.
• Clean the customer part cross-reference for your largest customers. Every approach depends on it.
• Check the price lists. Confirm the prices in the ERP match what sales actually quotes.
• Trial on real RFQs. Include the messy ones, and count corrections per quote.

See it on your own RFQs

Send a real request for quote and read the Quote Entry draft Fluent produces, with every unresolved field named. See the Quote Entry agent, all agents and pricing, or book a demo.