AI ROI Map · Customer Operations"Find the BOM, pull the line items, fill our template - for every enquiry."

Bill-of-Materials Extraction

Quote requests arrive as spec sheets in each customer's format, and somewhere inside each one is the bill of materials. Quoting starts when those line items are in your template - so today, someone types them there. The ask: make that transfer automatic, reviewable and exact.

The ask, as we heard it

The quote starts inside someone else's document.

A request for quotation arrives as a spec sheet - a PDF or a spreadsheet, laid out however that customer lays things out - and somewhere inside it sits a bill of materials. Nothing can be priced until those line items are in the manufacturer's own template: item, make, part number, quantity, unit of measure.

So a person opens each file, finds the BOM, and moves it across by hand, cell by cell. Enquiries arrive faster than the people available to attend to them, which means the speed of quoting is set not by engineering judgment but by data entry.

Heard from an engineered-components manufacturer quoting into regulated industries. Paraphrased, like everything on this map.

Why it is harder than it looks

The BOM is one table on a page full of tables.

Extracting a table sounds solved until the table is one of many, drawn in someone else's format, inside a scan. Four things separate this from the demo version of the problem.

  • The BOM is not the document. A spec sheet carries revision histories, title blocks, notes - tables everywhere. The system has to find the one that is semantically a bill of materials, and when two candidates look alike, the honest move is to show both and let a human choose. Not to guess silently.
  • Scans defeat the copy-paste era. These PDFs are often images with no text layer. The standard trick - screenshot the whole table and ask a model to extract it - produces confident output with swapped columns and merged rows, and nothing flags it. Reading the document's own geometry to find each cell, then transcribing cell by cell, is slower to build and the reason the output can be trusted.
  • Every customer's format is a dialect. Column names never match your fields - their "MFR name" is your "make" - and that mapping is a judgment. It should be made once per format, reviewed by a person, and then hold for every future file that arrives looking the same.
  • The template is the contract. The output has to land in your quoting template, exactly. Anything short of that has not removed the re-keying - it has moved it downstream.
Where the ROI sits

Where quoting time actually goes.

We do not attach figures to demand signals - directional is the honest register, and these pools are expensive enough without decoration.

Engineering hours at the keyboard

The cost

Every enquiry is a stack of files, and each file means a person walking a BOM into the quoting template cell by cell - skilled time spent on transcription.

The return

The extraction runs in the tool; the person reviews, corrects the odd cell, and exports. The keyboard time goes.

Transcription errors in quotes

The cost

A digit slips between the spec sheet and the template and nothing flags it. The error surfaces later, already priced into a quote.

The return

Cell-level extraction with a review step catches the slip while it is still on screen - before it becomes a price.

Quote latency

The cost

Enquiries queue behind the data entry, and the quote leaves at the speed of the slowest transcription - while the customer is also waiting on your competitors.

The return

The bottleneck moves from typing to judgment. The time goes into the price, not the paperwork.

On the platform

The document engine, pointed at quote requests.

Two engines run in production today - Analytical Lab Reports and account Knowledge Twins. Everything else on this map is an extension on the same foundation.

This entry is the Intelligent Document Agent mechanism behind Analytical Lab Reports, pointed at commercial documents. Find the table that is semantically a BOM. Read it cell by cell instead of guessing at a screenshot. Learn each customer's format once, as a reviewed profile, so every later file in that format lands the same way. Export into your template, exactly.

AI reasons over the document; your template and your review stay in charge of what ships. Nothing leaves the tool without a person having had the chance to correct it.

Read the full use case
Who it is for

The people quoting the work.

Roles

  • Quoting and proposal teams
  • Application engineering
  • Sales operations
  • IT, as the control owner

It runs inside your infrastructure, within your boundary. The spec sheets are your customers' confidential designs - they never leave it, and neither does your pricing logic. The freedom of action stays yours: which models do the reading, where the workload runs, what it costs to keep running.

Back to the AI ROI Map

See it on your own spec pack.

Bring one enquiry - the PDFs and spreadsheets exactly as they arrived - and watch the line items land in your template. Or run the public exercise first and try to prove us wrong. No form, no gate.

On-prem. Your data never leaves your boundary.