Priced tenders, cut from five days to under five minutes.
A high-end residential builder in Surrey priced every tender by hand. Now the draft is ready in minutes, costs are tracked against it once the job is won, and the client gets regular updates without anyone writing them.
Context
The firm builds multi-million pound private houses in Surrey. Every new project needs a priced tender: hundreds of line items, each costed from current supplier prices and then marked up by rules that lived in the owner's head and a stack of spreadsheets.
The problem
Each tender took the owner around five days. Supplier prices moved while he worked, so early lines were stale by the time he finished the last ones. And once a job was won, the tender stopped being useful. Nobody could see actual spend against it, and every client update was written up by hand.
What we built
A pricing engine that pulls in current supplier costs, applies the owner's own rules to the project's quantities, and produces a draft tender he can edit before exporting a client-ready document. When the job is won, the same system tracks spend against the tender line by line and sends the client progress updates.
- 01Pulls in current supplier costs
- 02Applies the owner's pricing rules to every line
- 03Drafts the full tender for the owner to review
- 04Tracks spend and updates the client as the build runs
The decision that mattered
We kept the AI away from the prices. Every figure is calculated from a dated supplier cost and a named pricing rule, and the owner can click any line to see where it came from. A tender is a commercial offer a client will hold you to, so speed was only worth having if each number could be checked in seconds.
to produce a priced tender, down from around five days
of spend tracked against the tender once work starts
client progress updates, with nobody writing them up