In distribution, the first quote back usually wins the order

A metals or chemicals distributor receives requests for quotation by email, every one in a different shape. A salesperson decodes the request, hunts for stock, prices it and retypes it. The work is not hard. It is just slow, and in this trade the supplier who answers first is very often the supplier who gets the order.

The use case

The agent reads the incoming request, matches line items against the catalogue, pulls stock and price, and produces a draft quote for a salesperson to approve. The salesperson stops transcribing and starts deciding, which is the part you were paying them for.

What it is worth to the business

Response time is the whole argument. Not cost per quote, not headcount. If your quotes go out while the buyer is still comparing, you are in the conversation. If they go out the following afternoon, you are a price check on somebody else's offer.

There is a quieter benefit. Every quote becomes structured data. What you were asked for and did not have in stock is a demand signal that most distributors currently throw away.

Four decisions you have to make

1. Does the agent send, or prepare. Start with prepare. A human in the loop costs you minutes and buys you the right to be wrong occasionally without it reaching a customer.
2. What discount range it can offer without approval. If the answer is none, say so explicitly, because the alternative is that it invents one.
3. What happens on an unrecognised line item. Guess, or stop and flag. In distribution a confident wrong match is worse than a slow answer, so the default should be to stop.
4. Who owns the catalogue. Not who owns the agent. Who updates the catalogue when a product changes. This is the dependency that decides whether the system is still accurate in a year.

Where to start

Take last month's requests and run them through in shadow mode, without sending anything. Compare the draft against what actually went out. You will learn more about your catalogue quality than about the agent, and that is a useful thing to learn early.

Technical footnote

Email ingestion, catalogue matching, price list lookup, draft generation. The catalogue matching is the hard part and it is hard for an old-fashioned reason: buyers describe products in their own words, and your catalogue describes them in yours. That translation layer is where the project succeeds or fails, and no model choice rescues a catalogue nobody maintains.