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Quote Workflow
Quote Workflow

Review contract documents in SonicSpec to identify scope of supply, product configurations, and compliance remarks for your quote.

Mike Nowoswiat avatar
Written by Mike Nowoswiat
Updated over 2 weeks ago

Up until now, users have strictly utilized SonicSpec to review Masterformat specifications more accurately and to quickly generate professional CD&E documents.

Today, we are excited to release our biggest product feature to date, the SonicSpec Quote Workflow. Now, you can utilize SonicSpec and its AI-powered feature set to perform every action in your quote analysis from opening up your contract documents to pricing your equipment.

Specifically, these quoting actions comprise the following:

  1. Open and review any type of contract document (drawings, specs, other)

  2. Identify the products you intend to quote (your scope of supply)

  3. Record the project requirements from the contract documents for each product and service

  4. Annotate any requirements that cannot be met or are not in your scope that must be communicated to your customer (clarifications, deviations, exceptions, N/A, etc.)

  5. Configure your company's products that best match the project requirements

  6. [Available via integration] Send these product configurations to your selection/pricing software to quickly quote your customer.

Take a Guided Tour through the workflow here.

How to Quote a Project in SonicSpec

1. Ensure your account is setup

  1. Configure your company's specification splitter settings from your account page. The specification splitter will allow you to automatically search for and extract relevant specification sections from project manuals based on common specification numbers.

  2. Configure your product selection tables for your respective product types and product lines. Product selection tables allow you to configure your company's product offerings in accordance with your company's product configurations, options, and accessories. You will then be able to quickly turn project requirements (Quote Considerations) into configured products using the established configuration rules for each product selection table.

2. Add a new project and upload contract documents

  1. Click the 'Add New Project' button from your Projects page.

  2. Upload Files

    1. Upload specifications using the 'specification' upload module. This will allow you to utilize the SonicSpec specification CD&E feature to analyze Masterformat specifications better.

      1. Be sure to add the respective product type for each specification section as this will help quickly add requirements found in the specification as quote considerations to the products you add in the next step. For example, by associating a generator spec with a 'generator' product type, we can help you more easily add generator requirements to any generator products that you add.

    2. Upload drawings or any other non-specification contract document using the 'drawings' upload module.

3. Add Products to identify your scope of supply

  1. Using the product panel on the right side of your screen, add products using the 'Add from Area' button or individual product buttons.

4. Begin adding Quote Considerations (QCs) to your products and Compliance Notes to your note panel

Note: These steps are documented in the video provided in section 3.

Add QCs to products

  1. Once new products have been added to your product list, you can begin aggregating all of the project requirements found across all contract documents to record the product requirements that must be met as you configure your product in the final steps. For instance, if a specification states that a 5 year warranty must be provided for each product on the project, you can add a Quote Consideration of "5 Year Warranty" as a QC to each product's QC list.

    Adding QCs from Drawings

    To add QCs from Drawings, utilize the 'Add QCs from Area' action button within an individual products' QC list. This will allow you to draw an area on the drawing file that contains relevant project requirements to your product. Be sure to verify that the QCs that were added by the AI are correct.

    Additionally, you may manually type in any QCs within the same product QC list below the 'Add QCs from Area' action button and any existing QCs that have already been added.

    Adding QCs from Specifications

    There are three ways that you can add QCs from a specification file:

    1. Add QCs from CD&E: As you review the specification using CD&E mode, you can simply click the '+' icon next to any QC found in the Quote Consideration column and select which product QC lists you wish to add the QC to. If any QCs are missing from the Quote Considerations column of the CD&E, you can type in a new QC and a new '+' icon will appear, allowing you to add the new QC to any product QC lists.

    2. Add QCs from spec scan: Upon adding a specification

Add Compliance Notes to your note panel

  1. While you look to add QCs to your products, you can simultaneously add any relevant Compliance Notes to your note panel to record any compliance remarks that must be communicated to your customer with respect to how your product or service complies (or doesn't comply) with the requirements found across your contract documents. Compliance Notes will be stored with a relationship to the respective contract document file that the Compliance Note was made so that your customer can easily understand which file and project requirement in that file that each Compliance Note is referencing.

5. Use the Configurator to configure your products

  1. After you have added all relevant QCs to each product's QC list, you can open your Configurator module to leverage SonicSpec's AI-powered configuration feature to quickly translate all of the relevant QCs into the best product configuration in accordance to your company's configuration rules. Or, you can manually make product selections as you reference your product QCs in the product panel.

6. Export your product selection configurations, compliance notes, and/or CD&E documents

  1. Depending on your quoting objectives, you can export your product selection configurations, compliance notes, and/or specification CD&E documents to a PDF document.

  2. If you'd like to introduce more significant time savings, we can help integrate the SonicSpec Configurator directly with your organization's selection software so that you can eliminate the duplicate step of needing to fill out product selection fields in both SonicSpec and the selection software. Additionally, by establishing this connection, we can utilize SonicSpec's Configurator to help propose the best quote options and alternatives to help you win a higher percentage of the projects you bid.

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