AI systems for manufacturers, where the RFQ arrives as a PDF and somebody retypes it into the ERP
Where the money leaks
Every RFQ is retyped by hand
The customer sends a PDF, an Excel file with their own part numbers, or an email listing what they want. Somebody translates it into your system line by line. It is the single most repeated hour in the business and it is done by people you hired for their judgement.
Quote turnaround decides the order and it is measured in days
By the time a quote is out, the buyer has two others. Most of the elapsed time is not engineering or pricing, it is the request sitting in a queue waiting to be transcribed.
Where is my order takes the estimator away from estimating
Customers call to ask about lead time, ship dates and backorders. The answer is in the ERP. The person answering is usually the one who should be quoting the next job.
Supplier lead times are chased one email at a time
Confirming what is coming and when means contacting a dozen suppliers individually, then chasing the half that did not reply, then updating a spreadsheet that goes stale the same afternoon.
A schedule change on the floor reaches the customer last
A machine goes down or a material arrives late. Production knows in minutes. Sales finds out when the customer calls, which is the worst possible order.
Quality and nonconformance records are written up after the fact
A deviation happens on a Tuesday and the paperwork gets done at the end of the week from memory, which makes it both slower and less useful than it should be.
What we automate
RFQ reading and ERP entry
Incoming requests read whatever form they arrive in, line items extracted, customer part numbers matched to yours, and a draft order or quote created for a person to check rather than type.
Quote assembly and turnaround
Quotes assembled from your own pricing rules and history, with the exceptions flagged for a human, so routine requests go out the same day and the hard ones get the attention.
Order status and lead time answers
Where-is-my-order, ship date and backorder questions answered directly from the ERP in whatever channel the customer asked, without interrupting anyone.
Supplier follow-up and lead time confirmation
Purchase order acknowledgements and delivery dates chased automatically across your supplier list, with changes surfaced against the jobs they affect.
Proactive delay notification
A schedule change on the floor traced to the affected orders and customers, and communicated by you before the customer discovers it.
Inventory and reorder signals
Stock positions, usage trends and reorder points watched continuously, with the fast movers flagged before they run out and the dead stock flagged before it becomes a write-down.
Quality and nonconformance capture
Deviations, scrap and corrective actions captured on the floor in the moment, assembled into the record your quality system needs rather than reconstructed later.
Certificate and documentation packs
Material certificates, test reports and shipping documentation assembled per order automatically, so a shipment is not held for a document somebody has to go and find.
Job shops and custom fabrication
Quoting is the product and it is unpaid. Every drawing that comes in costs engineering time whether or not it turns into an order. The win rate and the cost per quote together decide whether the shop makes money.
The same customer part arrives under three names. Their number, your number and whatever the drawing calls it. Matching them is a small act of expertise repeated hundreds of times a month.
Scheduling is a whiteboard that reality argues with. A rush job, a late material, a machine down. The plan changes hourly and everyone downstream is working from a version of it that is already wrong.
Drawing and RFQ intake
Requests, drawings and revisions captured on arrival with quantities, materials, tolerances and dates extracted, and a matched draft prepared for the estimator.
Quote follow-up
Quotes chased on a schedule that stops the moment the customer replies or orders, so the ones that were nearly won do not go quiet by default.
Job status and floor updates
Job progress visible to sales and to the customer without walking out to the floor to ask.
Our drawings are technical. Can a system read them reliably?
What happens when it matches the wrong part number?
We quote from experience, not from a price list.
Industrial and wholesale distribution
Availability is the question and the answer is already in your system. Do you have it, how many, when can I get it. Constant, answerable, and currently answered by people.
Reorders are predictable and manual. The same customers order the same things on roughly the same cadence, and almost nobody automates the prompt.
The catalogue is bigger than anybody's memory. Cross-references, substitutes and supersessions are expertise that lives in two or three long-serving people.
Stock and availability answers
Availability, pricing and lead time questions answered from live inventory across phone, email and web, with a substitute offered when the item is out.
Reorder prompts and standing orders
Customers contacted on their own consumption cycle rather than on a calendar, so the repeat order happens without a rep remembering.
Cross-reference and substitution
Competitor and superseded part numbers matched against your catalogue, so a request in somebody else's numbering does not need an expert to answer.
Our pricing is customer-specific and confidential.
Will this replace our inside sales team?
Food and beverage processing
Traceability is not optional and it is mostly paperwork. Lot codes, batch records and supplier documentation have to be complete and retrievable, and a recall test is a paperwork exercise under time pressure.
Shelf life makes every scheduling error expensive. Production, allocation and shipping decisions all run against a clock that other manufacturers do not have.
Customer and audit requirements arrive as forms. Specifications, questionnaires and certification packages, each slightly different, each needing information you already hold somewhere.
Lot and batch record capture
Production records captured at the line and assembled into a complete, retrievable trace rather than a binder somebody has to search.
Specification and audit document packs
Customer specification forms and audit questionnaires filled from your own held data, with the gaps flagged rather than left blank.
Shelf life and allocation alerts
Stock approaching its window surfaced early enough to be sold or moved rather than written off.
Can a system be part of our food safety record keeping?
We are audited against a certification scheme. Will this pass?
Contract manufacturing and OEM supply
You live inside your customer's systems. Their portal, their forecast, their EDI, their labels. Most of the administrative burden comes from being on the supplier side of someone else's process.
Forecasts change and the change is buried. A revised schedule arrives as a file. Working out what actually moved, and which of your jobs it affects, is manual comparison.
Documentation travels with the goods. Certificates of conformance, test reports and material certs, per shipment, correct, or the receiving dock stops it.
Customer portal and EDI handling
Orders, releases and schedule changes pulled out of customer systems and into yours without a person watching a portal.
Forecast change detection
Each new schedule compared against the last, with the real changes and their effect on your jobs surfaced instead of buried in a file.
Shipment documentation packs
Conformance and test documentation assembled per shipment automatically, so the paperwork is ready when the goods are.
Our customers mandate their own systems. Is there room for this?
We have EDI already. Is this the same thing?
Building products and millwork
You are quoting into construction schedules. Your customers are contractors and their timelines move, which means your quotes, submittals and delivery dates move with them.
Custom and stock live in the same order. A single job mixes catalogue items with made-to-order pieces, each with a different lead time and a different failure mode.
Delivery to a site is not delivery to a dock. Access, timing and who signs for it are all variables, and getting them wrong means the load comes back.
Takeoff and quote request intake
Contractor requests, drawings and schedules captured and turned into structured quote requests, with revisions tracked against the original.
Submittal and approval tracking
Shop drawings and product data tracked from submission to approval, with the schedule impact of a late approval visible before it becomes yours.
Site delivery coordination
Delivery windows confirmed with the site rather than assumed, and reconfirmed before the truck leaves.
Our customers change the order constantly.
Can this connect to the contractors we sell to?
Parts, MRO and aftermarket
The customer is down and time is the entire value. An aftermarket parts enquiry usually means a machine is stopped. Speed of identification and availability is the service.
Identification is the hard part. A serial number, a photograph, a description from someone who is not sure what the part is called. Matching that to a catalogue is expert work done under pressure.
Returns and warranty claims are administrative sludge. They are unavoidable, low margin, and they consume the same people who handle new orders.
Part identification from customer input
Serial numbers, photos and descriptions matched against your catalogue and history, with the confident matches answered directly and the uncertain ones routed to a person with the candidates attached.
Emergency availability and expediting
Down-machine enquiries identified as urgent on arrival, answered against live stock, and escalated to a human immediately rather than queued behind routine traffic.
Returns and warranty processing
Return authorisations, documentation and status handled automatically, so claims do not consume the order desk.
Can it identify a part from a photo?
Our catalogue data is inconsistent across decades of product.
Which of these to fix first
Everything above is a list, and a list is not an order. If you want the order for your own week rather than for the industry in general, the automation scanner asks nine questions about how your week actually runs and returns the three jobs to automate first, with the hours each one gives back. It takes about two minutes and nothing you enter leaves your browser. If the problem is the site rather than what happens after someone gets in touch, the website test scores your page against the nine checks a first-time visitor makes.
And if you run several of these
Everything above assumes one operation. Once there is more than one, a second problem arrives on top of it, and it is not the first problem repeated. Nine locations answering the same customer question nine different ways is not a capacity failure, it is a consistency failure, and it does not show up in any individual site's numbers.
If you run more than one manufacturing and distribution operation, or a franchise system, a regional chain, a dealer network or a practice group, the layer that goes over the top of this page is on the multi location page. Start here for the workflows, go there for what changes when you duplicate them.
What a first build usually looks like in a manufacturer
Almost always the RFQ path, because it is the clearest bottleneck and the easiest to measure. Requests read on arrival, line items extracted, part numbers matched, and a draft in front of an estimator the same day instead of three days later.
The second piece is usually order status and supplier follow-up. Both are high volume, both are answerable from data you already hold, and both currently interrupt the people whose attention is worth the most.
Everything is built on top of the ERP you already run. You own the result and the documentation.
The staged version of that order, with the test that says each stage is finished, is in the ninety day roadmap.
Why the ERP did not already solve this
Every manufacturer we talk to has an ERP, and most of them have the same complaint, which is that the system is excellent at recording what happened and useless at everything around it.
An ERP expects structured input. Your customers send unstructured input. The gap between the two is a person, and that person is the bottleneck.
An ERP does not chase. It will tell you an acknowledgement is missing if you go and look. It will not contact the supplier, note the reply, and update the job.
An ERP does not answer a question asked by email. The data is right there and the channel the customer used has no connection to it.
None of that is an argument for replacing it. It is an argument for building the layer that was always missing, on top of the system of record you already trust.
If you also sell online, the ecommerce side of this is covered on the ecommerce page, and the two are usually one system.
Why Automatik
Built for your stack
Not a generic bot, the system is wired into the tools your business already runs.
You own the system
Full access, full documentation. No platform hostage-taking.
Bilingual by default
Customer-facing pieces work in French and English from day one.
Loi 25 compliant by design
Consent, transparency and data-handling designed in, not bolted on.