Inquiry management in construction

The daily flood of inquiries received through a wide variety of channels and with a range of file formats poses a significant challenge for inquiry management. Retailers, manufacturers and suppliers sometimes receive up to 7000 inquiries for proposals and request for quotations (RFQs) monthly from developers and specifiers. These RFQs are sometimes hundreds of pages long and quite often contain more than 1000 items. There are also media discontinuities in the inquiry process. Not everyone uses GAEB as a standard data format, meaning that companies also have to deal with continuous text from emails or PDFs in the RFQ process. This entails a lot of valuable time being lost in the quotation process.

What does RFQ stand for?

RFQ stands for Request for Quotation and forms a central part of a tender.

For a requirement described in detail, a service description is requested with a price that is as precise as possible, but is generally non-binding. Suppliers receive these inquiries from the construction supply industry, among others.

What does GAEB stand for?

GAEB files act to exchange digital information on the construction site. Data exchange using a GAEB format ensures secure project documentation and has established itself as a standard. GAEB files can be read and edited by both the client and the bidder.

Until now, these RFQs could not be automatically assigned to the company's available products and services as part of RFQ management and involve a lot of manual work.

Although the number of employees in the quotation team is constantly growing, many incoming inquiries still remain unanswered. There is simply a lack of time and resources. AI software provides relief for your employees here.
 

AI software provides relief and time savings

Using our partner ITyX's AI software and the appropriately trained algorithms, we are now achieving an automation grade of 70% to 80%. Products are assigned automatically using AI support, saving the inquiry management team a great deal of time. 
 

Example of tender management without AI-supported modules

A construction supplier for sanitary facilities receives a tender for a hotel chain that needs to be responded to. However, such inquiries often consist of different formats. This ranges from emails with simple flowing text or with PDFs as attachments all the way to what are known as GAEB files. 

Since there is no automatism, the different file formats and the sheer number of RFQs pose a major challenge for construction suppliers. All service items have to be manually reconciled with the quotation portfolio, sometimes multiple times in different departments of the company. Since most companies do not have the appropriate software available, time-consuming manual work is required and there is a risk of losing a potential customer.

RFQs sent to different company branches, sometimes across countries, are another complicating factor. Without a relevant AI solution, a huge amount of time is required to find out the characteristics for two or three identical queries that are congruent (duplicates), or to compare different country-specific prices. The processes in our application automatically detect these duplicates and therefore significantly accelerate the process of creating quotations.

ORBIS ConstructionRFQ automates inquiry management using artificial intelligence (AI). Items in the purchasing process are automatically recognized and matched with the product and service catalogs. Automatic matching means there is no need for manual research. Time and media disruptions become a thing of the past and quotation inquiries no longer get left behind.

Streamline your sales workflow using the new ORBIS inquiry management application ConstructionRFQ. We have designed our AI-based software in such a way that it helps your company to create automated quotations and increasing your closing rate.

• Scanning and indexing of requests for quotations (email, PDF as well as GAEB) enables optimal content capture of all files and eliminates the need for manual capture
• Automated matching of leading positions with available products
• Prevention of duplicates and different pricing
• Cost reduction and acceleration of the bidding process

RootNine – the professionals in quotation generation in the Cloud

RootNine's cloud-based working platform enables planners, manufacturers and distributors to process inquiries and tenders quickly and easily as well as to prepare quotations in a central system. All project participants are always informed about the current status and can exchange the corresponding documents via the cloud platform or also in GAEB format.

ORBIS – your ideal partner for digitalization in the construction industry

In digitalizing the customer journey, we focused on the relevant trends and challenges in the construction industry. Construction companies and construction suppliers are taking the next step toward digital transformation with our forward-looking solution based on the Azure platform: Our expertise from numerous customer projects as Microsoft Partner as well as our extensive network in the industry make us your ideal IT partner! From object identification and customer centricity all the way to digital construction sites and downstream service activities - you gain process expertise and solution diversity from a single source