RFQs and bid lists into draft quotes, checked against the quotes you sent.

Requests come in every shape: a contractor's material list, a few spec pages naming approved manufacturers, a buyer's spreadsheet of part numbers, an email asking for the same as last time plus extras. Someone matches each line to an item, checks the shelf, finds the account's price and types the quote.

For the test, AI reads copies of those requests and drafts each quote: item, quantity and unit, branch stock or vendor lead time, and the price with its source. A line it can't settle, such as a product you don't carry, goes on a short list for your salesperson with the reason. No quote is sent.

A bid list is not a parts list. A takeoff counts material the way an estimator does, by footage, size or fixture type, often in the spec's own words. Specs commonly name approved manufacturers and say whether and when an equal is allowed: one public bid document considers equals only after bid opening, another wants them approved before bids are due. A brand the spec doesn't name can be thrown out at submittal, so the draft keeps the named manufacturer wherever you carry it and marks any equal for a person.

The price can come from three places: the customer's contract, a quote the same buyer got last month, or a manufacturer's special pricing for one job. Job pricing has its own rules. Leviton's published quote policy, for example, requires the quote number and quote price on the distributor's purchase order, or the order bills at the standard distributor price, and each quote names the projects and contractors it covers. Job pricing applied to the wrong contractor costs you when the claim is checked, so every draft line names its price source.

Copper and lighting lines carry extra terms. Wire and cable prices often follow copper: one cable maker's published terms reprice each order from the exchange copper quote on the day before the order arrives. On many commercial jobs an independent lighting rep prices the lighting package, with a distributor margin built in. The draft keeps the metal basis, the rep's reference and the valid-until date on the lines they belong to.

Your ERP treats a quote as its own document. In Prophet 21 a quote is an order entry document with the Quote box checked before the first item, and a P21 partner's guide notes that the Quote to Order wizard recalculates pricing at conversion. In Infor's SX.e a quote order (type QU) updates no customer, ledger or product records until it is converted, and a lost quote carries a lost-business reason on each line. That makes lost quotes worth including: your reviewer sees whether the draft would have priced them the same way.

A few requests arrive by EDI, as an X12 840 request for quotation expecting an 843 reply. Most still come by email, which is what this test covers. Your reviewer, usually the inside sales manager or senior quoter, watches price sources, stock promised from the wrong branch, unmarked equals and missing valid-until dates.

Once your reviewer says yes against the success criteria, the same job runs on incoming RFQs and bid lists for about 30 days.

Every draft quote waits for a salesperson to check, change or discard it, and only a person sends a quote to a customer. Prices still come only from your own records.

The live run has a fixed price you see before signing. Whatever comes next is priced as its own job.