How Generative AI Automates and Optimizes Quotations for Manufacturers and Wholesalers

In the fast-paced world of manufacturing and wholesale, responding to customer requests for quotations (RFQs) can often be a manual, time-consuming process. Once the quote is sent, customers frequently review the proposed materials, terms, and pricing, making edits or adjustments before finalizing their order. This back-and-forth creates complexity and potential for errors, especially when the final order doesn’t match the initial quotation.

With the rise of AI technology, particularly generative AI, businesses can now automate this critical step—ensuring that the quotation and final order align with 100% accuracy. Let’s explore how this innovation transforms the quotation process and integrates seamlessly into your overall quote-to-cash cycle.

Understanding the Quote-to-Cash (QTC) Process

Before diving deeper into how generative AI enhances the quotation process, it’s essential to understand how it fits within the broader quote-to-cash (QTC) cycle.

The quote-to-cash process is a comprehensive workflow that spans all the steps from generating a quote to receiving the final payment. This cycle typically includes quotation creation, order approval, invoicing, and payment collection. It’s a critical process for manufacturers and wholesalers, as it directly impacts revenue, operational efficiency, and customer satisfaction.

While we won’t delve into every detail here, you can refer to our detailed QTC diagram that illustrates each stage of the process, from the initial quote generation to data collection. AI technology is revolutionizing this entire process, and automation at the quotation stage is a key component of transforming the QTC cycle into a more efficient, accurate, and streamlined workflow.

The Challenge: Managing Quotation Edits and Final Orders

Consider a common scenario: A manufacturing enterprise sends a detailed quotation to a customer. The customer, after reviewing it, modifies quantities, adds or removes material numbers, or adjusts pricing based on agreed-upon discounts. Traditionally, these changes are handled manually—requiring the sales team to review and approve them, which increases the likelihood of errors, missed changes, or miscommunication between the quote and the final order.

This process becomes especially cumbersome when dealing with long lists of materials, complex pricing structures, or high-value orders. Even the smallest mistake can lead to delays, disputes, or financial discrepancies.

The Solution: AI-Powered Quotation Matching and Mapping

Generative AI steps in to address these challenges by automating the comparison and reconciliation process between the initial quotation and the final customer order. Here’s how it works:

1. Quotation Analysis: Once the customer sends back the final modified quotation, generative AI automatically reads the email in the shared mailbox and instantly analyzes the changes. Whether it’s material numbers, quantities, special agreements, or discount adjustments, the AI identifies every modification made.
2. Matching and Mapping: After reviewing the customer’s edits, the AI compares the updated quotation with the original and automatically maps these changes to the final order. The AI also matches and maps the information with your master data, applying any exceptions or business rules to ensure compliance with your company’s specific policies. This guarantees that every approved change is reflected correctly in the order processing system, ensuring a seamless and accurate order fulfillment process.
3. Upselling and Cross-Selling Opportunities: Beyond simple matching, AI provides opportunities to increase upselling and cross-selling by analyzing historical data and previous customer changes. Based on the edits made in the quotation, AI can suggest additional products, alternative materials, or complementary services that align with the customer’s needs. This is a great chance to offer added value to your customer, helping you increase revenue while ensuring the final order includes relevant and beneficial options.

Benefits of Automating Quotation Processing

By leveraging generative AI to automate and compare email quotations, businesses can experience a range of benefits:

• Error-Free Orders: Generative AI ensures that the final order always matches the quotation, preventing costly mistakes and disputes.
• Increased Efficiency: AI significantly reduces the manual workload of reviewing and processing customer edits, allowing sales and customer service teams to focus on higher-value work. Instead of manually matching and mapping information between quotations, orders, and ERP systems, everything is handled automatically with 100% accuracy.
• Faster Processing: AI-powered automation doesn’t just match and map quotation data—it goes one step further by instantly processing the final order in your ERP systems. Once the final order is confirmed, AI ensures it is automatically entered into the system with 100% accuracy and in real-time. This eliminates any delays caused by manual data entry, allowing your team to focus on more strategic tasks and speeding up the entire order fulfillment process.
• Improved Customer Satisfaction: By having accuracy and speeding up the AI-driven quotation processing, businesses can ensure more accurate and timely deliveries. This not only enhances customer satisfaction but also leads to increased customer loyalty, which ultimately has a positive effect on revenue.

Integrating AI into the Quote-to-Cash Cycle

While the focus of this solution is on automating email quotations, it’s important to view it as part of the larger quote-to-cash process. By streamlining this critical step, generative AI plays a pivotal role in optimizing the entire sales cycle. From ensuring accurate pricing and configuration in quotes to automating invoicing and order tracking, AI technology creates a more efficient, transparent, and scalable QTC process.

In particular, AI software for order management not only automates your quotation but also can track each step of the quote-to-cash cycle. This includes tracking the entire process from the initial quotation to the final payment, all in real-time. With this capability, businesses gain full visibility into their supply chain, allowing them to monitor every stage of the process, make data-driven decisions, and ultimately improve both operational efficiency and customer satisfaction.

Conclusion: Empower Your Sales Process with VAO’s AI Quotation Automation

Incorporating AI automation into your quotation process can lead to significant operational improvements. VAO’s AI-powered solution offers a cutting-edge approach to automating email quotations, ensuring 100% accuracy in matching and mapping customer edits to final orders. As part of the larger quote-to-cash cycle, this solution reduces errors, speeds up processing, and enhances customer satisfaction.

Unlock the full potential of AI in your sales process today. Contact VAO Labs to learn how we can help you implement AI-powered quotation automation tailored to your business.

+1 415-900-3935

Author:

Gagan Bhasin

Founder & CEO

VAO Labs

www.vao.world