PruvatoAn RFQ lands on WhatsApp at 10:40. Eleven lines. The fourth one reads:
20A MCB, 50 nos
Your salesperson knows what to do with that. They've quoted this customer for years, they know the contractor uses Hager on this kind of job, and they know which one because they remember the last order. Thirty seconds, done.
Now imagine the person who knows that is on leave.
The number
We've been building a catalogue of electrical products sold into this market: manufacturer part numbers, specifications, units, packaging. It currently holds 41,233 products across 18 categories, including 5,787 miniature circuit breakers from 12 manufacturers.
So we ran the obvious query. How many products does "20A MCB" actually match?
462. Across 12 manufacturers and 107 distinct product ranges.
Adding the things an RFQ usually does say doesn't close it:
| What the line says | Products that match |
|---|---|
| 20A MCB | 462 |
| + single pole | 123 |
| + type C curve | 45 |
| + 6 kA breaking capacity | 11 |
A fully specified description (pole count, current, curve, breaking capacity, which is more than most RFQ lines carry) still leaves eleven products on the table.
Why it doesn't close
Because manufacturers don't sell one 20-amp breaker. They sell a ladder of them.
Take Hager, at exactly 1 pole, 20 amps, type C. Seven products in our catalogue, across six ranges: MC, MU, MW, NC, NCN, NRN. The thing separating them is breaking capacity: 3 kA, 6 kA, 10 kA, 25 kA. Same nameplate rating. Different device, different price, different application.
Siemens does the same thing across 5SL3, 5SL4, 5SL6, 5SY5, 5SY6 and 5SY8. Gewiss across MT 4, MT 6, MT 60, MT 100, MT 250, MTC 45 and MTHP 250. ABB has ten products at that one spec. Schneider has eight, spread across Acti9, Easy9, Resi9 and xC60.
This isn't carelessness on anyone's part. A domestic consumer unit and an industrial distribution board need genuinely different devices, and the ranges exist to serve different price points and different fault levels. The segmentation is real.
It just doesn't survive contact with the phrase "20A MCB."
And here's the part that makes it worse: across all 5,787 breakers in our catalogue, only 40% of records state a breaking capacity at all. The attribute that does most of the discriminating is the one most often missing, from the manufacturer's own description, and from almost every RFQ we've seen.
The part that surprised us
We expected to find a lot of products answering to one description. We didn't expect to find products that are indistinguishable from each other.
Those 45 products at 1P / 20A / type C have 45 distinct part numbers but only 21 distinct specifications. Twenty-four of them match another product on every single attribute anyone records.
The clearest case is ABB. At 2 poles, 1 amp, curve K, our catalogue holds 22 separate ABB products, 22 real part numbers across 11 ranges: S202, S202M, S202MT, S202MTR, S302P, S802HV, S802S, ST202MTR, SU202DC, SU202M, SU202MR.
Every one of those 22 has an identical specification on file.
They are genuinely different products. ABB isn't duplicating anything. The difference lives in things a product description doesn't carry: the terminal design, the DC rating, the auxiliary contacts, the approvals, the intended market. But if all you have is a line of text, there is no attribute you can add that will separate them.
What this costs
Four things, in rough order of how often we hear about them:
Re-quoting. The customer comes back and says "no, the NCN one." You've spent the time twice.
Quoting the wrong price. A 3 kA device and a 25 kA device at the same nameplate rating are not close in cost. Quote the cheap one and win the job, and you've won a job you lose money on.
Delivery rejection. The breaker arrives, the consultant checks the fault level, and it goes back. Now you're paying for the return and the replacement, and you've burned a week.
The knowledge leaving. All of the above is normally prevented by one person remembering what a particular customer means. That memory isn't in your ERP. It's in their head, and it walks out when they do.
What you can do about this today
None of this requires buying anything.
Ask for the breaking capacity. It's the single field that resolves most of this ambiguity, and it's missing from nearly every RFQ. One line in your reply: "Which kA rating do you need?" It feels pedantic the first time and it saves a return.
Ask for the range, not just the brand. "Hager MCB" is not a product. "Hager NCN" is. Most customers know which range they're on, because it's what they bought last time.
Put the part number on your quotation. If you quoted NCN120A, say so. It gives the customer a chance to object before delivery instead of after, and it converts a disagreement about what they meant into a disagreement about something written down.
Write down what your regulars mean. When a customer says "20mm conduit heavy," somebody in your office knows which brand that is. Get it out of their head and into a shared sheet. It's tedious and it's worth more than any software you could buy this year.
What we do about it
We built Pruvato because the fourth line of that RFQ shouldn't need a specific person to be at their desk.
What it does with "20A MCB" is not pick one. It narrows to what your company actually stocks, shows you the candidates with the reason for each, and asks. When your team confirms which one that customer meant, it remembers: for that customer, for your company.
What it won't do is guess. When 24 out of 45 candidates are identical on every attribute available, anything that returns a single confident answer is inventing one.
How we counted
Figures are from the Pruvato canonical catalogue as of 18 September 2026: 41,233 products, assembled from publicly available manufacturer catalogues and datasheets.
"Matches" means products whose recorded specification is consistent with the description; a product with no recorded breaking capacity is counted as consistent with any breaking capacity, which is how a human reading an RFQ would treat it too.
If you think a number here is wrong, tell us and we'll check it.