The Nine Stage Engine
An engine that reads inbound quote requests the way your most experienced estimator does — and knows when to stop and ask a human instead of guessing.
It threads the conversation. Multi-message email chains are merged into one running order, not reprocessed as isolated messages. A reply that says “make that 20 instead” is understood as a correction to the existing line, not a new request.
It reads your catalog, not a generic one. Every match is scored against your actual parts — dimensions, materials, part-number aliases, the exact vocabulary your customers use (“hex bolts” vs. “HCS” vs. the SKU on the spec sheet). If a match is confident, it moves forward. If it’s ambiguous, it’s flagged for review with the reasoning shown — not buried in a black box.
It prices and schedules against your real numbers. Cost, margin, and production time come from your data, computed the same way every time, with a full audit trail of how each figure was reached.
It knows what it doesn’t know. Every quote passes through a gate before anything goes out. Confidence thresholds, value ceilings, and required fields are all configurable — nothing ships unattended until you decide it’s ready to.
A human is always one click from the decision. The reviewer sees the customer’s request, the top candidate matches with plain-English reasoning, the price, the production estimate, and the draft reply — and can correct any of it before it goes out.