Case 01 / 04

Seven input points, one app.

Year
2026
Role
Summer Associate
Type
Consulting, internal product
Less time per quotation
70 to 80 %

精 jīng · Precision

Situation

Every quotation passed through seven manual input points. Each one lived in its own document. Prices in one file, scope in the next, terms and conditions in a third.

Writing a single offer meant copying values from one document into another and checking afterwards whether anything had drifted along the way. Nobody liked the process. Everybody knew it by heart.

7 manual input points per quotation, each in its own document

Task

Cut the time per quotation without dropping the review steps the team relied on. The result had to work for people who had never asked for a new tool.

Approach

  1. 01

    Recorded the existing process end to end before building anything. Every file, every click, every handover between two people.

  2. 02

    Mapped the seven input points against each other and marked which one actually held the source of truth for each value. Three of them held copies, not originals.

  3. 03

    Wrote the requirements in the wording of the people who write the offers, not in mine. Where they had their own word for something, that word went into the interface.

  4. 04

    Built the internal app so that all seven input points arrive in one form, with the existing review steps kept in place rather than optimised away.

  5. 05

    Rolled it out on live quotations with one team first, then fixed what broke in the first week before the rest followed.

Result

70 to 80 %

Less time per quotation

Preparation time per quotation dropped by 70 to 80 percent.

  • 7 to 1manual input points, now one form
  • 3 of 7input points held copies, not originals
  • 1 weekabout that long the tool was ready before the people were

How it was measured

Measured against the old process. The comparison is the time the same people needed for a comparable offer before and after, taken from their own working records rather than from an estimate. The range is wide because a simple offer gains less than a complex one.

What I learned

Recording the process first felt slow and was the only reason the app fit. What I underestimated was the rollout. The tool was ready about a week before the people were, and that week cost more attention than any feature.