By industry
AI Transformation for Manufacturing and Distribution
Manufacturers and distributors carry two kinds of expensive work: quoting, where margin is decided by judgment, and answering, where the same questions come at the same people every day.
Both are held in the heads of a small number of long-serving people, which is also the retirement risk nobody wants to talk about.
Where the money goes
| Operation | What it costs you now |
|---|---|
| Quoting and estimating | Two days per estimate, and a fifth going stale |
| Customer support | Three people on inbox and chat answering the same questions |
| Floor and technical knowledge | Forty questions a week to the owner or plant manager |
| Order entry and confirmation | Manual re-keying from emails, PDFs, and portals |
| Collections | Cash sitting in 60- and 90-day, chased when someone has time |
What changed after we built it
| Measure | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Quote turnaround | Two days, about a fifth going stale | Four hours |
| Support load | Three people on inbox and chat | Carried by the system, those three moved on |
| First reply time | Hours | Minutes |
| Cash collection | Chased when someone had a spare hour | About 12 days sooner |
Every row above comes from one build in one company, linked at the foot of this page. It is not an average. Your numbers will land somewhere else, which is the reason the assessment comes first.
Quoting is where the margin is decided
A distributor writes estimates from price lists, freight tables, and a salesperson's memory of what that account paid last time. Two days is normal. About a fifth go stale before they go out.
The reason it takes two days is not the arithmetic. It is that the arithmetic depends on judgment, and that judgment lives with two people who are also doing four other things.
Trained on the catalog, the freight rules, and three years of quotes you actually sent, a system drafts the estimate and a person approves it. One distributor moved two-day estimates to four hours.
Support volume is mostly the same forty questions
Lead times, tolerances, substitutions, returns. A manufacturer we worked with had three people on inbox and chat carrying that load every day.
The training set was their actual replies and the rules they apply, not the rules they published. That difference is the whole reason help center chatbots underperform. First reply went from hours to minutes, and the three people moved onto work a system cannot do.
Two people know how the place actually works
In most plants there are two or three people who know how things actually work. Everyone else asks them. When one retires, a decade of judgment walks out with them.
A system trained on your SOPs and the answers those people have already given puts that knowledge where the floor can pull it. That is worth doing before the retirement, not after.
What an assessment looks at here
- Quote turnaround time, and the percentage that go stale
- How much of quoting is lookup and how much is genuine judgment
- Volume and composition of support contacts over a representative month
- Which questions concentrate on which people, and what happens if they leave
- Where orders are re-keyed by hand between systems
What this industry asks first
Our pricing rules are not written down anywhere.
That is the normal case, and it is why the training set is three years of quotes you actually sent rather than a rules document. The pattern is in the history whether or not anyone wrote it down.
We run an old ERP. Is that a blocker?
Rarely. If it can export, it can be read, and plenty of what we build reads from exports rather than live connections.
Do we lose control of pricing?
No. The system drafts and a person approves, with hard floors on margin built into the escalation rules.
What this looked like when we did it
What people here weigh us against
Find out what your most expensive operation is
The assessment covers every operation in the company, not only the one you would name. You get it in writing, and you can build from it with or without us.