VDB IS

Maritime · Commercial

AI for quotation and estimation

Can AI write our first-draft quotes?

The challenge

Enquiry volume outgrows estimating capacity. Quotes go out after competitors', and win rates fall for reasons unrelated to price.

Prerequisites

  • Two to three years of job costing history
  • Agreement on how margin is set

The approach

  • Consolidate historical job costing into one reviewable dataset
  • Retrieve comparable past jobs and draft a priced quote for the estimator to correct
  • Fix guardrails on material, labour and margin assumptions with the commercial lead
  • Weekly accuracy review for the first quarter, with the estimator retaining every decision

What makes it work

The estimator never approves a number they cannot trace to a comparable job.

What we would measure

Quote turnaround

Median hours from enquiry to first draft

Win rate

On repeat and near-repeat work

Estimator hours

Spent on drafting versus judgement

Risk position — Limited risk. Human decision on every commercial output.

Baselines are established in your business during the assessment. We publish no borrowed benchmark numbers.

Assess this for our business

Related use-cases