Automating enquiry triage and RFQ logging

How a made-to-order manufacturer stopped losing enquiries in a shared inbox and removed around 45 minutes of manual handling from every RFQ. At TEOX prices, from £9,000 fixed, that one workflow pays back in under four months.

The challenge

The inbox was the register. There was no single list of live enquiries, so answering “what have we got out at the moment” meant somebody scrolling and guessing.
Every enquiry was handled by hand: read it, work out what it is, file the attachments, create the job folder, key the details into the spreadsheet, acknowledge the customer, chase what was missing. Around forty-five minutes before an estimator did any estimating.
Enquiries sent to an individual who was on holiday or on site sat unread, and nobody could say how many were missed, because there was no record of the ones that were.
Attachments were filed inconsistently, so the same drawing pack existed in three places under three names.
Acknowledgement took two to three days on a good week. On a bad week the first thing the customer heard was the quotation, or nothing.

What we built

Capture: everything reaching the sales inbox is picked up automatically, along with anything forwarded in by a named individual.
Classification: the assistant reads the message and its attachments and identifies what it is, a new enquiry, a revision, a chase, a purchase order or not an enquiry at all. Only the first two enter the pipeline.
Extraction: customer, end client, project, site, product type, quantity, return date and any stated commercial conditions are pulled into structured fields.
Filing: the job folder is created to the standard naming convention and every attachment is filed into it, deduplicated, with the drawing revision read off the title block.
Register: a row is written with a reference number, so the live enquiry list is a list that can be sorted, filtered and reported on, which an inbox cannot.
Acknowledgement: a branded reply goes back the same day carrying the reference and the named owner, and states plainly what is missing if something needed to quote has not been supplied.
Judgement stays human: the assistant proposes, the coordinator confirms on one screen. Nothing is priced, quoted or committed automatically, and every automated action is logged against the reference.

The results

The register replaced the inbox as the answer to “what is live”. Within a month the sales meeting was run off it rather than off recollection.
The first month of clean data showed a conversion rate noticeably different from the one that had been assumed, which changed where estimating effort was pointed.
Customers began quoting the reference back, which removed a whole category of “did you get my email” calls.
Hit rate by customer, product type, estimator and value band became answerable, because for the first time the data existed.

The economics

At TEOX prices this is one Tier 1 build, fixed at £9,000 against a written scope. The payback test uses the business’s own loaded labour cost, and we run it before a price is quoted: 30 enquiries a week, 45 minutes removed from each, 22.5 hours a week recovered at £60 an hour across 46 working weeks.
£62,100 of enquiry handling released a year, £50,100 of it net of the ongoing support plan.
Payback in around 3.5 months on total cash out, well inside the twelve-month ceiling every TEOX build is bound to. If a scope does not clear twelve months it is cut until it does, or it is not quoted at all.
Deliberately excluded from that arithmetic: the enquiries previously never quoted at all, which the first month of register data put at roughly one in fourteen. No value is claimed for them, because it cannot be evidenced from the business’s own records.

What transfers to your business. Every made-to-order manufacturer has a front door, and in most of them it is a shared inbox that nobody owns and nothing reports on. Enquiry handling is the smallest useful thing you can automate and the one with the shortest route to a defensible number, because the work being removed is clerical, high-volume and near enough identical every time. No new system, no data migration, no change to how anybody estimates.

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