PruvatoAn RFQ arrives at 10:40. Somebody reads it, works out what the customer means, looks up what's in stock, checks what this customer paid last time, asks whether the discount is allowed, builds the quotation, and sends it. For a long BOQ that's most of an afternoon.
Ask around and most UAE electrical trading firms will tell you the same thing: quoting isn't the bottleneck because anyone is slow. It's the bottleneck because every RFQ hides the same four small jobs inside one message, and all four still run through one person's head.
Where the time actually goes
A real request rarely arrives as a clean, structured list. It's a WhatsApp message, something like "Salam, need price urgent, 4c16 swa, socket 2 gang, MCB 32A curve C, delivery tomorrow inshallah," or an Excel sheet with shorthand only one or two people in the business actually read fluently. Before a price can even be looked up, someone has to:
- Work out which exact product the customer's own shorthand refers to.
- Check this customer's discount tier and commercial terms.
- Convert between the units the customer used and the units stock is tracked in.
- Type the whole thing into a document that looks like a real quotation.
None of those four steps is hard on its own. Doing all four, correctly, for every line of every RFQ, several times a day, is what actually eats the afternoon.
What's realistic to get back
The identification step, working out what a customer's own shorthand actually means, is the one part of this that software can now do reliably: matching messy real-world text against a real catalogue in seconds instead of minutes per line. The commercial decisions underneath it (this customer's price, this customer's terms, whether a substitution is acceptable) are exactly that: decisions, made with your own rules, not guessed at by a general-purpose tool.
That split is worth being precise about, because it's also where a lot of quoting-automation pitches overreach. A tool that produces a quotation with a wrong price and no explanation isn't an improvement on an experienced salesperson: it's a liability with better formatting. The useful version reads the RFQ, identifies the products, and then hands a person a draft to check and send. It never goes out on its own.
See what Pruvato actually does with this split, or why this only recently became solvable.