Solutions / Contractors
Your estimator spends three days a week formatting quotations.
Soluvide builds a quotation and BOQ pipeline for UAE maintenance and facilities contractors. It reads the incoming scope, pulls your approved rates and standard line items, assembles a formatted quotation or bill of quantities, and holds it for a human to approve before it goes out — so estimators stop retyping and start reviewing.
01 / The problem
What actually happens on quotation day.
An RFQ lands by email, WhatsApp, or a portal. Your senior estimator opens the last similar quotation in Word or Excel, copies the rates, edits the line items, reformats the header, and sends it back. The approved rates live in one person's spreadsheet — or one person's head — and every quotation is re-keyed from scratch.
For a multi-branch contractor producing dozens of quotations and bills of quantities a month, this is not a small task. It is days a week of a senior, expensive person doing formatting work — the one person who also happens to be the bottleneck when a tender is due.
The second cost is consistency. When two estimators quote from two different copies of the rate sheet, the same scope gets two different prices. Margins drift. A number that should have been AED-per-unit fixed becomes a guess, and nobody notices until the job is won at the wrong price.
And because quotations are the front door to revenue, every day a quotation sits in a queue is a day a competitor who replied faster is ahead of you. Speed and consistency are not nice-to-haves here — they decide which jobs you win.
02 / Why the obvious fixes fail
You've probably already tried these.
The ERP quoting module
Generic ERP quoting modules assume a fixed product catalogue. A maintenance BOQ is scope-driven, not SKU-driven — the module can't express your line-item structure, so estimators export to Excel anyway and you're back where you started.
The master template
A shared template works until a rate changes and nobody updates the master. Within a quarter, three versions are circulating and each estimator trusts a different one. The template didn't fail because it was badly made — it failed because keeping it current was manual.
Hiring another estimator
Another estimator adds another person doing the same re-keying, and another copy of the rate sheet to keep in sync. It scales the cost and the inconsistency at the same time. The work itself is the problem, not the headcount.
03 / How the system works
A pipeline, with a human on the pricing.
Ingestion
The scope arrives by email, PDF, or WhatsApp. A parsing step extracts the line items and quantities and normalises them — so "supply & fix 2x AC split units" is understood as structured data, not a wall of text.
Rate & line-item store
Your approved rates, units, and standard scopes live in a structured store — one source of truth, not a spreadsheet per estimator. Updating a rate updates every future quotation automatically.
Assembly
The generation step assembles the quotation or BOQ from your approved templates against current rates. It is constrained to your rate store — the model formats and structures, it does not invent prices — so numbers can't hallucinate.
Review gate
The draft lands in front of an estimator to approve or adjust before it's sent. Unknown scope items are flagged, never guessed. The system removes the typing; the human keeps the judgement.
Output & record
On approval, the formatted quotation is produced, versioned, and logged — and can be synced into your ERP or CRM. Every quotation is traceable back to the scope that produced it.
04 / What's in scope — and what isn't
Clear lines, agreed up front.
In scope
- Parsing incoming RFQs and scope from email, PDF, and WhatsApp
- A structured store of your approved rates and standard line items
- Automated assembly of quotations and bills of quantities from your templates
- A human review and approval gate before anything is sent
- Version history and an audit trail on every quotation
- Sync of approved quotations into your ERP or CRM
Out of scope
- Setting or changing your prices — you own the rate table
- Removing the human approval step
- Replacing your full ERP or accounting system
- Guessing a rate for a scope item it hasn't seen
05 / Integration surface
Named systems, not “connects to anything.”
We confirm exactly which of your systems connect during scoping. The pipeline commonly touches:
Timeline & scope
Live in weeks, quoted before we start.
Most quotation pipelines go live in about two to four weeks. What moves it inside that range is the size of your rate table, the number of document formats, and how many systems it connects to. We map the work in a short discovery call and send a fixed-fee proposal — scope, timeline, and deliverables — before any build begins. No hourly billing, no surprises.
06 / Questions estimators ask
Straight answers.
Does the system set our prices for us?
No. You own the rate table. The pipeline assembles quotations from your approved rates and standard line items — it never invents a number, and a human approves every quotation before it leaves the building.
What happens with a scope item we've never quoted before?
Unknown or non-standard items are flagged for a human to price, not guessed. The system is built to say "I don't have a rate for this" rather than fabricate one, because a wrong number on a quotation is a commercial problem.
Can it read RFQs that arrive as PDFs, emails, or WhatsApp messages?
Yes. The ingestion step parses incoming scope from email, PDF attachments, and WhatsApp, extracts the line items, and matches them against your rate store. Anything it can't confidently match is routed to an estimator.
Does this replace our ERP or accounting system?
No. It sits alongside the tools you already run and can sync approved quotations into your ERP or CRM. It replaces the manual re-keying and formatting, not your system of record.
How long does it take to go live?
Most builds go live in about two to four weeks, depending on how many rates and templates are involved and which systems it connects to. We scope the work first and send a fixed-fee proposal before starting.
Does it handle Arabic scope and bilingual quotations?
Yes. The pipeline handles English and Arabic scope text and can produce bilingual output where your clients require it.
Who owns the system once it's built?
You do. It runs on your infrastructure and accounts, it's documented, and it's handed to your team — no black box and no dependency on us to keep it running.
Start
Get your estimators off formatting duty.
Tell us how your quotations get built today. We'll map the pipeline and send a fixed-fee proposal within 24 hours.