RFQ automation for industrial equipment.
RFQ automation usually means software that moves a request for quote through your process faster: routing it, templating the response, tracking where it sits.
All of that assumes the RFQ arrived complete. In industrial equipment it usually did not, and the time you lose is spent getting to a quotable specification, not producing the document once you have one.
TWO DIFFERENT THINGS
Buyer-side and supplier-side automation are not the same product.
The term covers two markets that have very little to do with each other. On the buyer side, procurement teams automate sending RFQs out to a vendor list and normalizing what comes back. That software is bought by the person purchasing, and it is a genuinely different problem.
On the supplier side, which is where you are if you sell equipment, automation means what happens to a request when it arrives. Most of the tooling here was built for the case where a complete, structured RFQ lands from a portal: line items, quantities, specifications, a deadline. If that describes your inbound, the standard tools work.
For most equipment manufacturers and distributors it does not. The request arrives as three sentences on WhatsApp.
The incomplete RFQ is the normal case, not the exception.
"Can you quote me on a pump" is a real RFQ, and it is unquotable as written. Before anyone can price it, someone has to establish a list of things the sender did not think to include, usually because they did not know they mattered.
What is typically missing
The application
What the equipment is for, which determines everything downstream. What is being moved, cleaned, cut, or lifted, and in what condition.
Duty cycle
Two hours a week and sixteen hours a day are different machines at different prices. Nobody volunteers this number.
Site conditions and power
Three phase availability, ambient conditions, drainage, access for installation. Any one of these can eliminate the model you were about to quote.
Who is actually asking
A maintenance manager replacing a failed unit and a project engineer specifying for a new line need different responses, on different timelines, at different prices.
A longer form does not solve this, and it costs you submissions.
The obvious fix is to ask for everything up front: a detailed quote request form with the fields your team needs. Every equipment company tries this. Two things go wrong.
The first is that a form is flat and diagnosis is conditional. Whether the power supply question matters depends on the answer to the application question. Whether you need drainage details depends on what is being washed. A form cannot branch on an answer it has not received yet, so it either asks everyone everything, which is long enough that people abandon it, or it asks the safe generic subset, which is exactly the incomplete RFQ you started with.
The second is that the buyer often cannot answer the questions in the form. They know the pump is leaking. They do not know the head or the flow rate, and a required field asking for it does not create the knowledge. A person would work around this by asking what the pump is doing and inferring the rest. A form cannot.
This is why the round trips happen, and each one costs a day.
What is actually worth automating.
Ranked roughly by how much time each recovers in an equipment business.
Conditional intake
Asking the next question based on the last answer, the way a salesperson would, instead of presenting a fixed field list. This is the step that eliminates round trips rather than shortening them.
A completeness check before handoff
Nothing reaches a salesperson until the answers needed to price it are present. The expensive failure is a quote request that sits in someone’s queue for two days before anyone notices it is unquotable.
Catalog matching
Narrowing to the models that fit the application and the site constraints, so the person quoting starts from a shortlist rather than the full catalog.
Follow-up on stalled requests
RFQs go quiet constantly, and the second and third touch are where equipment deals close. This is pure recovered revenue and it is almost never automated.
WHAT WE DO
Anytrail gets the RFQ to quotable. Your team quotes it.
Anytrail answers the request when it arrives, on WhatsApp, from an ad, or from your website, and works it the way your own team would: what the application is, how hard the machine will run, what the site can support. It asks the next question based on the last answer, so a buyer who does not know the flow rate still ends up somewhere quotable.
When the picture is complete it matches the application against your catalog and hands the request to a salesperson with the answers already collected. Requests that go quiet get followed up over the following days and weeks without anyone having to remember.
It stops there, deliberately. Anytrail prepares the quote; it does not issue one. Pricing, the technical recommendation, and the final document stay with your team. An agent that quotes autonomously is an agent that will eventually commit you to a price or a lead time you cannot honor.
What this does not do.
- It does not issue quotes, set prices, or commit to lead times. It collects what a quote needs and hands that to a person.
- It is not a procurement or eProcurement tool. If you are the buyer sending RFQs out, this is the wrong side of the market.
- We make no claims on this page about integrations with any specific ERP, quoting system, or supplier portal.
- We publish no figures on RFQ volumes, cycle times, or win rates. We have not measured them ourselves.
See how many round trips your RFQs actually take.
Before the call we send a real request through your own channels and count the exchanges it takes to reach something quotable. You get the findings whether or not you buy anything.
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