In the manufacturing sales process, speed, accuracy, and efficiency are crucial. They face constant pressure to deliver accurate quotes quickly while managing complex product configurations, fluctuating costs, and growing customer expectations. Salesforce’s latest Sales report reveals that sales reps spend only 27% of their time selling. Most of their efforts go into generating quotes, preparing proposals, and waiting for approvals. These inefficiencies slow down the sales cycle while increasing the risk of pricing errors, lost deals, and dissatisfied customers.
This is why manufacturers are turning to AI-driven quote automation. By adopting AI, CRM tools, and intelligent pricing systems, it transforms quoting into a faster, more accurate, and seamless process. This helps sales teams save time on manual calculations, eliminate errors, and accelerate response times.
This blog explores quote automation, the challenges it solves in manufacturing, the impact of AI Agents on quoting and reordering, and the role of Salesforce Revenue Cloud and Kasmo’s SmartQuote Agent in helping manufacturers automate quote and reordering processes and increase customer satisfaction.
What Is Quote Automation in Manufacturing?
Quote automation in manufacturing streamlines and accelerates the creation, management, and approval of sales quotes. It uses AI, sales CRM tools, and pricing systems to generate accurate quotes, calculate costs, and validate configurations, in fewer clicks by eliminating manual data entry and complex calculations.
This technology reduces pricing errors and inconsistencies, accelerates the quote-to-order cycle, lowers operational costs, and improves overall quote accuracy. As a result, it saves the sales team time on administrative tasks and focuses more on building customer relationships. This helps manufacturers win more deals, increase revenue, improve customer satisfaction, and achieve faster turnaround times.
How Quote Automation Works
Centralized Data Integration: Integrates product, pricing, inventory, and customer data from ERP, CRM, and other systems.
Rule-based Configuration: Pre-defined business rules are combined with AI models and BOM data to ensure accurate cost calculations for custom engineering, bulk order discounts, and market-specific pricing.
Automated Quote Generation: It can analyze and configure complex products, calculate accurate prices, and produce ready-to-send quotes according to customer requirements and specifications.
Workflow and Approval: Routes quotes through necessary approvals and workflows automatically. This results in a faster, error-free approval process that reduces delays, ensures compliance, and provides visibility into each quote’s status.
Seamless Customer Delivery: Generates error-free quotes and enables quick sharing with customers via email, portal, or integrated sales systems.
The Current Challenges in Manufacturing Quoting
Increased Operational Costs
In manufacturing, generating quotes manually is time-consuming and needs more effort from sales, engineering, and operations teams. Complex product configurations, multiple pricing checkpoints, and approval loops increase labor hours, leading to higher operational costs. Additionally, delays or errors in the quoting process cause production inefficiencies, margin erosion, and reduce profitability.
Complex Configurations
Manufacturers often deal with highly configurable products—custom machinery, equipment bundles, or parts with multiple options. Creating accurate quotes for these products is challenging, as each variation can affect pricing, lead times, and production planning. So, with various product options, it is difficult to manage unique customer requirements and quoting accuracy. Misconfigurations can lead to costly reworks, delays, and unhappy customers.
Pricing Errors
Pricing in manufacturing is rarely straightforward and constant. As the sales team is juggling material costs, labor rates, machine time, and more, mistakes are common. There are also higher chances that different sales reps apply different discounts, leading to confusion and a lack of trust. All these errors result in underpricing, eroding margins, or overpricing, which risks losing customers. Accurate, automated pricing is critical for maintaining competitiveness and profitability.
Slower Responses
Customers expect fast and accurate quotes. Manual workflows, complex product configurations, and approvals slow down response times. This leads to delays in order confirmations, disruptions in production schedules, and ultimately losing customers. So, speeding up processes is essential for maintaining customer trust and driving growth.
Lack of Visibility in Quote Tracking
Without centralized systems, sales and operations teams struggle to track quote status, approvals, and revisions. Limited tracking mechanisms hinder monitoring quote status, leading to lost opportunities. For manufacturers, this creates operational bottlenecks and increases challenges to forecast demand, plan production, and ensure timely delivery.
AI-Driven Quote Automation: Transforming Quoting and Reordering
Predictive Costing
One of the biggest advantages of AI in manufacturing is quote management and predictive costing. AI and ML can analyze large amounts of historical data like past quotes, actual costs of production, raw material price fluctuations, and labor hours. Using this data, AI builds predictive models that deliver highly accurate cost estimates for new projects. It considers every detail, including material expenses, labor rates, machine run times, and overheads, to provide realistic, data-driven insights. This reduces cost estimation time, eliminates assumptions, and increases precision.
Instant Quotation Generation Using AI Algorithms
AI-powered algorithms enable manufacturers to automatically generate quotes based on predefined pricing structures and business rules. These systems consider multiple variables, including raw material costs, profit margins, volume discounts, delivery timelines, and customer-specific requirements, to create accurate, customized quotations in real time. AI-driven quote automation helps manufacturers save time, reduces manual calculations, ensures consistency, and improves efficiency. It also enhances customer trust, accelerates sales cycles, and increases competitiveness.
NLP for Extracting Customer Requirements
Natural Language Processing (NLP) enables manufacturers to quickly understand customer needs. It helps to extract hidden information within unstructured data sources such as emails, chat transcripts, or online requests. Techniques like keyword extraction, intent detection, and context analysis help businesses to capture critical details—ranging from product specifications and order volumes to delivering personalized quotations. This reduces the dependency on manual interpretation, minimizes errors, and speeds up the quote generation process.
Dynamic Pricing Optimization
The manufacturing market is constantly shifting, with fluctuations in raw material costs and changes in customer demand. So, AI-powered pricing intelligence is effective in handling them. Predictive analytics can evaluate live market conditions, track competitor movements, analyze production capacity, labor availability, and delivery timelines. These details help AI to recommend the most effective quote price. It can also flag opportunities for strategic discounts, grab high-demand projects, forecast potential supply chain risks, and maximize profitability.
ML for Demand Forecast
Machine learning techniques, including regression models, time series analysis, and neural networks, help manufacturers in customer demand forecasting. ML algorithms analyze historical sales data, market trends, seasonal fluctuations, and other relevant factors to generate accurate future demands. These predictions help manufacturers to optimize production schedules, resource allocation, and adjust pricing strategies to match changing market conditions. Businesses can eliminate overproduction, inventory costs, and gain operational efficiency.
How Salesforce Helps Manufacturers with Quote Automation
Salesforce helps manufacturers in effective quote management and reordering processes by providing CPQ (Configure, Price, Quote) under Revenue Cloud. It helps to automate and streamline the creation of accurate and customized quotes. Salesforce integrates customer data from the CRM and ERP systems for a unified view. This tool allows sales teams to quickly select product options, apply discounts, and generate pricing, which reduces quote creation time.
Using Agent Builder, sales teams can merge pre-configured quoting skills with their unique pricing and packaging data, enabling the creation of intelligent applications that generate precise quotes quickly. By integrating these capabilities, Salesforce reduces the need for manual data entry, eliminates errors, and accelerates the quote-to-cash cycle.
Salesforce also helps automate multi-level approvals, routing quotes based on predefined business rules. This ensures compliance with internal policies, reduces bottlenecks, and provides complete visibility into each quote’s status. A clear workflow helps sales teams create and update quotes instantly across any channel, ensuring consistency and accuracy. Salesforce acts as a comprehensive enabler for intelligent, AI-powered quote management, ensuring accuracy, speed, and profitability in the sales process.
Kasmo’s SmartQuote Agent Accelerator for Smarter Quoting and Reordering
SmartQuote Agent is a comprehensive AI-powered solution designed to streamline the entire quoting and reordering process for manufacturers. It can be easily integrated with BOM 360 and the Salesforce ecosystem. SmartQuote Agent automates quote generation and repeat order processing using real-time cost data, business logic, and AI-driven decision support. This ensures that every quote or reorder is accurate, profitable, and delivered quickly, eliminating the need for manual intervention.
As Smart Quote Agent is integrated with Bill of Material 360, when a customer submits a new quote request or places a repeat order, it automatically triggers BOM 360. This enables manufacturers to retrieve updated cost inputs from procurement, logistics, and plant operations. Furthermore, it applies predefined pricing rules, discount thresholds, and profitability controls to generate a full quotation. This level of automation workflow removes inefficiencies and risks associated with manual quoting, such as pricing errors, approval delays, or misaligned costs.
Implementing SmartQuote Agent helps manufacturers gain significant benefits:
Reduces Times: AI Agent reduces quote and reorder cycle times by 80–90%. It accelerates the quote-to-order process, helping manufacturers respond faster to customer inquiries and shorten sales cycles.
Zero Manual Effort: For recurring orders, the agent uses historical data to automatically generate quotes and reorder confirmations without human intervention.
Optimizes Profit Control: Agent enhances margin control by continuously monitoring costs, margins, EBITA checks, and profitability targets, ensuring that every quote and reorder aligns with business objectives
Higher Customer Satisfaction: Providing rapid and consistent responses to customer inquiries ensures that quotes are delivered quickly, accurately, and reliably. Using Agents’ sales reps reduces errors and inefficiencies while enhancing speed and consistency to build customer trust.
Increased Collaboration: Integration of data from procurement, production, logistics, and sales ensures all teams have access to a single updated dataset. This reduces miscommunication, speeds decision-making, and enhances operational efficiency.
Conclusion
Quote automation in manufacturing acts as a productivity booster tool. It empowers sales teams with AI-driven quoting, dynamic pricing optimization, and predictive insights. This automation eliminates quoting challenges and enables intelligent tools to fully automate an end-to-end quoting and reordering solution.
Kasmo’s expertise in the Salesforce ecosystem helps manufacturers to embrace this AI-driven quote automation. With solutions like Salesforce Revenue Cloud and the SmartQuote Agent, Kasmo integrates real-time data, streamlines approvals, and automates quoting and reordering workflows. This not only empowers sales teams but also ensures that every quote is aligned with profitability goals and delivered quickly.
