Manufacturing · Example: metal plant, 250 employees
From 3 days to 4 hours: comparing supplier bids at a metal plant
Example project. Procurement compared bids in mixed formats by hand. We built a tool that puts every bid into one table and flags hidden costs; comparison time fell from three days to four hours.
- Client
- Example: metal plant, 250 employees
- Industry
- Manufacturing
- Duration
- 12 weeks
- Systems and technology
- Priority, Outlook, Excel, Claude
Baseline
Three buyers received about 40 bids a month as PDF, Excel and email text. Comparing an average tender took about three working days, measured on 12 tenders in the quarter before the project.
What we built
A tool that reads each bid from the procurement inbox, extracts items, prices and terms into one Excel table, and flags freight, minimum orders and dollar indexation. It reads Priority (read-only) to compare with past prices.
We deliberately did not build automatic approval: the procurement manager decides.
Training and AI champions
Two buyers trained as AI champions. They learned to update the hidden-cost list and add a new supplier without code.
Before and after
| Before | After | |
|---|---|---|
| Time to compare bids per tender | 3 days | 4 hours |
| Bids checked for hidden costs | 20% | 100% |
What didn't work
Bids sent as photos of printed pages were read with low accuracy and stay with manual review.
Handover
The code, prompts and model-provider account are in the plant's name. Since handover the champions added a payment-terms check on their own.