A manufacturing client needed to create scalable practices to support their estimate processors and streamline their operation. The estimate processing team was overwhelmed with 10,000+ monthly emails for requests to bid on projects, but less than 20% of those requests were relevant.
The challenge was that actual people had to read each email and the associated attachments to determine whether to bid or pass on each opportunity. As the business grew, this manual process led to increasing inefficiencies and slow responses.
The SafeNet Consulting opportunity was to introduce artificial intelligence software to automate reading emails, determining which projects to bid on, and scoring the opportunity to help with prioritization. SafeNet partnered with the client to bring experience, expertise, and a pre-launch emerging technology, Azure Form Recognizer that uses machine learning technology to identify and extract key-value from documents to solve this challenge.
The full Azure Cognitive Services (ai) solution worked to:
- Automate human processes
- Collect and structure-specific data
- Leverage structured data in downstream processes
- Obtain structured data for operational trending and efficiency
- Gain data-driven insights and utilize insights for a strategic recommendation
The team worked on iterating and refining as the technology solution was introduced and refined. The result of this approach produced almost $500,000 in annual human capital savings and the ability to re-skill, up-skill, and potentially down-size staff. The estimate processing team also gained the ability to capture data for analytics that may help downstream processes like:
- Auto-quoting of projects with a lower risk profile
- Predictive quoting of what larger projects should be quoted at
As a Microsoft Partner, SafeNet Consulting is well versed in emerging technology solutions and has the expertise to bring the right solutions to help companies remove human data integrity issues and improve productivity through artificial intelligence.