A customer's RFQ package, read onto one specification sheet your estimator can price from.

The package rarely lands in one format. A process plant sends a requisition, a filled-in vessel data sheet and its engineering specifications. A utility sends a specification section through its engineer. A food maker may send a sketch and a paragraph. Your estimator or applications engineer reads all of it, works out which construction code and edition governs, and writes down the design conditions, materials, nozzles, corrosion allowance and the inspection and stamping requirements that will drive the price.

For the test, AI reads copies of those packages and drafts the specification sheet in the layout your estimators use, with each entry tied to the document and page it came from. Where two documents disagree, both values appear. A field the package leaves blank stays blank and goes on the clarification list. No customer hears about it, and no calculation is run.

ASME publishes the questions. Form U-DR-1, User's Design Requirements for Single-Chamber Pressure Vessels, sits on ASME's forms page, marked as revised for the 2025 edition, with a U-DR-2 for multi-chamber vessels. It runs from owner, operator and city of installation through service and specific gravity to yes-or-no boxes for National Board and Canadian registration and a special service line for lethal, direct firing or unfired steam boiler duty. NB-57, the National Board and ASME guide for certification reviews, asks who in a shop decides whether that form is required and who checks a customer's specification against the scope of the Certificate of Authorization. When a package arrives without the form, the draft borrows its order, so an empty row shows exactly what the customer never said.

One line on a requisition is several boxes on the form. MAWP is either the same as design pressure or calculated by the manufacturer. Minimum design metal temperature gets two cases, each marked process or ambient. Corrosion allowance splits into shell, heads, nozzles, jacket, coil, supports and internals, inside and outside. Post-weld heat treatment is per code or process required, cyclic service brings cycles, design life and a fatigue analysis box, and one box asks whether coating is permitted before the pressure test. On the back, joint categories A, B, C, D and F each take a type of joint and NDE with comments, shell, cone and head thickness each name the joint efficiency they rest on, and body flanges point to ASME PCC-1 for joint assembly. The draft fills in what the package states and computes none of it.

Plants and tank buyers bring forms of their own. Process Industry Practices publishes data forms and instructions for specifying Section VIII vessels as VEDV1003, used with its design and fabrication specification, VESV1002, which reaches through shipping and documentation. A tank RFQ goes another way. A public contents list for API 650, in the 2018 addendum to its 2013 edition, shows Annex L as the Storage Tank Data Sheet and Annex W as Commercial and Documentation Recommendations, with separate annexes for seismic design, internal floating roofs, shop-assembled tanks and austenitic stainless steel. That listing marks the edition as since replaced, so the draft records which edition and which annexes this buyer named and leaves their reading to your estimator.

A public buyer's blanks are part of the specification. The New York State Office of General Services master section on multi-column elevated steel water tanks lists what the purchaser supplies under AWWA D100: capacity, bottom or top capacity level, head range, riser diameter, even the nearest town and railroad siding with their distances from the site. Corrosion allowance is a blank with none required as one choice, earthquake design points to D100's Section 13, and delegated design calculations come signed and sealed by a New York licensed engineer. In a bid set, a bracket nobody chose is a question, and the draft treats it as one.

The clarification list is where a reviewer looks first. A package can name Section VIII with no division or edition, show one nozzle count on the data sheet and another on the sketch, or call for plate as A516 when the NB-57 review asks whether materials are ordered to SA, SB or SFA specifications. Each goes on the list, quoted from both places, for your estimator to take up with the customer. Your reviewer, usually the chief estimator, checks that the governing code was read correctly, that every field traces to the right page, that every conflict was caught, and that the list matches what your team really asked.

A yes from your reviewer sends new RFQ packages through the same reading for about 30 days.

Your estimator checks and corrects every sheet before a number is worked up, and any question for a customer leaves from your office. The comparison table keeps running on live packages, the next job carries a price of its own, and monthly support comes after that.