Create Instant Quotes for Complex Engineering Products using AI + Salesforce
Challenge: If you are an engineering company focused on Contract Manufacturing, Precision Automotive or Aerospace Parts Manufacturing, Construction or similar lines of business, there is a very good chance that your sales process involves a Schematic Diagram that has to be parsed and understood before preparing a customer quote. It is likely that engineers spend a lot of time studying the schematic and understanding the elements or components of the schematic and documenting them. This is usually followed by searching for the right vendor that can price the component appropriately and quickly deliver the. All of these steps are essential before creating the actual customer quote.
Solution: What if we can reduce the time it takes to produce these quotes from days or weeks to seconds? We can utilize the existing schematics and quotes to develop and train an AI model that can read the schematics, understand the context and produce a list of components needed. This can then be used with your CRM or sales tool to produce the quote.
Vectr Solutions has partnered with Smarttrak to develop a prototype to prove this concept using Smartrak’s proven AI model and Vectr Solutions' expertise with Salesforce CRM. In this article, we will describe how we solved this using a general use case and discuss how this can be extended to any industry and any use case.
Lego Quote Generation: A Generic Use Case for Proving the Concept
If you ever built a Lego set, you are well versed with the instruction booklet that comes along with the set that contains all the parts and instructions to build the set. The idea behind our prototype is that we can:
Take any of these lego set instructions
Load them into Salesforce
Figure out all the parts needed
Build a quote based on the parts and their quantities
How do we accomplish this process within Salesforce?
In order to do this, we created a parts catalog in Salesforce with part numbers and prices. To keep it simple, we used one price book for the parts and assumed that one supplier can provide all the parts needed. We built a simple user interface that can be invoked from an opportunity that can take a logo instructions pdf and the total number of sets to be built as an input. Our team built a set of robust APIs that can pass this document to the AI engine that does the magic of parsing the document and identifying all the part numbers and quantities, regardless of how the information is structured in the pdf file.
How can AI expedite the quoting process?
We trained the AI model to understand the lego instruction pdfs to produce more and more accurate results over a short period of time. Once the AI model returns the parts via API response, logic built in Salesforce finds the right parts from the catalog, applies quantities and price, followed by quote generation for the total number of sets to be built. For simplicity, we did not apply any other pricing rules like discounts but those can easily be added.
The results are amazing. A detailed quote is generated in seconds based solely on a pdf uploaded to Salesforce. Manual data entry and quote creation would take hours if not days depending on the complexity and number of parts in the set.
Vectr Solutions and Smarttrak Can Help Solve Your Specific Needs
If you are curious about what we can do for your specific industry and your specific needs, Vectr Solutions and Smarttrak will be happy to help with a visioning exercise to understand and conceptualize your requirements. With Vectr Solutions' vast expertise in the Salesforce eco-system and Smarttrak’s proven ability to use AI to solve business problems, we can build amazing solutions that can increase productivity, reduce errors and help increase your teams capacity to quote and sell more.