RFQs & quoting
Extract quantities and requirements from customer documents, prepare a quotation draft or compare supplier quotations for someone to review.
AI Opportunity Sprint for Manufacturers
Leave with one practical pilot ready to scope.
Know what’s worth building first, why it matters, what it should do and roughly what it will cost. I spend time with your team to turn the strongest AI or automation opportunity into a practical pilot brief.
Typically £1,500–£2,500 · Factory visit, prioritised opportunities and a first-pilot brief with an indicative build budget.
Where to start
You know the work.
Which parts could AI help with?
AI is moving quickly, but working out where it fits around production, engineering and quality takes more than trying a chatbot. Many smaller manufacturers don’t have someone internally who can assess the options and build the useful ones.
The starting point is usually already there: RFQs in email, engineering documents on a shared drive, inspection records, spreadsheets and information in your ERP. I look at where people repeatedly read, search, compare, copy or summarise it.
Sometimes the right answer is a clearer workflow, a database or a conventional application. The aim is to choose the approach that makes the work easier. If no opportunity justifies a build, I’ll explain why and what needs to change first.
What happens
From the factory floor
to a sensible first pilot.
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Understand the business
A short initial conversation establishes the teams, goals and scope. During the factory visit, I speak with the relevant operations, engineering and quality staff.
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Map the work
We walk through actual workflows and review the spreadsheets, systems, documents and handovers involved. I look for repeated effort and the exceptions that make the work difficult.
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Find and assess opportunities
I aim to identify around 5–10 opportunities, then assess their value, feasibility and risks. Each is considered against both AI and simpler software approaches.
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Define the first pilot
We work through the strongest option: the problem it solves, what the pilot should do, how we’ll judge whether it helps and an indicative build budget. You leave with the decisions and open questions needed to scope the work.
Recognisable manufacturing work
The kinds of opportunities we look for
These are starting points to investigate, rather than a promise that every process needs AI.
Engineering knowledge
Help engineers find relevant SOPs, manuals, earlier jobs, drawings and decisions, with links back to the source material.
Inspection & quality
Draft inspection plans from customer requirements, summarise NCRs or explore patterns in inspection records. Quality staff review and approve the output.
Documents into data
Turn emails, PDFs and certificates into structured records, with checks for missing details and exceptions that need human attention.
Shift notes & reporting
Summarise handover notes and production records, or automate the recurring reports that keep someone copying information every morning.
Work instructions
Prepare draft instructions from approved engineering information, then route them to the people responsible for checking and releasing them.
The focus is supporting people with information and administration. Autonomous machinery control and safety-critical production decisions are outside this service.
What you receive
Know what to build first, and what it will take.
One recommended pilot, with a clear problem, expected value, outline scope, technical approach and indicative build cost. You can decide whether to fund the next step and take the brief into a scoping conversation.
If you’re considering a £5k–£20k automation project, this gives you a practical basis for the investment. That’s a potential build budget, separate from the sprint fee; the recommendation and estimate depend on your workflow.
A short visual report records the pilot brief and the wider opportunity map, including what to investigate or leave alone.
Illustrative deliverable · fictional example
Factory opportunity map
Build nowInvestigateNot worth pursuing
| Opportunity | Value | Complexity | Recommendation | Next step / approach |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| RFQ data extraction | High | Low | Build now | Test extraction on a small document set; a person checks the results. |
| Engineering knowledge search | High | Medium | Investigate | Check document quality and access permissions before a search pilot. |
| Automated production scheduling | High | High | Investigate | Map constraints and data quality; compare conventional optimisation. |
| Shift-report preparation | Medium | Low | Build now | Automate a structured report; use AI only if free-text summarisation helps. |
| Predictive maintenance | Medium | High | Not worth pursuing | In this example, failure history is too sparse. Improve records first. |
Example pilot brief · fictional scope and budget
Turn one RFQ format into a checked draft record.
Problem and value: Quote preparation starts with someone retyping customer requirements. Reduce that manual work and give the quoting team a consistent starting point.
What it should do: Extract part references, quantities and requested dates from one agreed RFQ format. A person checks and corrects the draft before exporting it. Direct ERP integration and automatic quote approval are outside this first pilot.
How we’ll judge it: Compare handling time and corrections against the current process using representative RFQs. Agree the success measures before building.
Indicative build budget: £5k–£8k. This fictional example assumes one document format, a review screen and a simple export. It is a planning estimate, not a fixed quote.
To confirm during scoping: Sample documents, field variations, data access and the export format. These determine the final scope, price and delivery plan.
How opportunities are ranked
- Business value
- How often the problem occurs
- Data availability
- AI versus conventional software
- Integration complexity
- Implementation effort
- Operational or quality risk
What happens next
Take the brief into a build.
I can scope and build the chosen pilot with your team. We confirm the details in the brief, resolve the open questions and agree a separate scope, price and success measures before starting. The sprint gets the project ready for that decision; implementation is quoted separately.
- 01Opportunity sprint
- 02Small pilot
- 03Production application
- 04Further projects
A useful pilot can become a working application once its accuracy, effort and fit with the process are understood. If it doesn’t help, the result is still useful: you can stop before committing to a larger build.
Already know the workflow you want to improve? Explore the Build Sprint →
Manufacturing workflows I’ve worked on
The operational context matters.
These projects connect operational data to the people using it, from build control and inspection to factory improvement work.
Lightweight Manufacturing ERP
BoM, purchasing, inventory and build status connected for an approximately 40-person manufacturer.
See the operational workflow →Digital Inspection & SPC
Engineering-defined measurements, simple operator capture and structured data for quality analysis.
See the inspection workflow →FactoryPulse
A tool built for a client to organise factory measures, improvement projects and problem-solving work.
See the client tool →AI Opportunity Sprint
A clear first project to take forward.
A half-day or full day with your business, followed by a walkthrough of the recommended pilot: why it’s worth doing, what it should include and a realistic budget range. The brief and opportunity map capture the decisions. We agree the teams, workflows and sprint scope before booking.
If you already have a defined operational problem, we can discuss a Spreadsheet-to-App Sprint directly. It includes mapping the process with your team.
Typical engagement
£1,500–£2,500
Starting from £1,500
- Half-day or full-day factory visit
- Interviews and a review of your existing workflows
- Aim to identify 5–10 opportunities
- One recommended pilot with outline scope and expected value
- Indicative build budget and questions to resolve in scoping
- Visual opportunity map and a walkthrough of the decisions
The price reflects the agreed scope. Any travel costs are agreed before booking. No commitment to a subsequent build.
Start with the work
Where is your team doing the same work twice?
Book a 30-minute conversation about your factory, the information your team handles and the processes that take more effort than they should. We’ll work out whether an AI Opportunity Sprint is a useful next step.