Description
The client is a German manufacturer of precision-engineered industrial components serving OEM customers across Europe. The sales team receives customized RFQs daily, each requiring different materials, production costs, freight calculations, and pricing rules. To avoid introducing another business application, the solution was designed as native Microsoft 365 add-ins, enabling users to work entirely inside Outlook and Excel while significantly reducing manual effort.
Challenge
Preparing quotations required sales managers to manually collect information from multiple disconnected sources, including Outlook emails, supplier price lists in Excel and PDF formats, freight tables, historical quotations, and internal pricing spreadsheets. Each quotation involved multiple manual calculations, validation by sales engineers, and final approval before being sent to customers. As RFQ volume increased, the manual workflow became a bottleneck, resulting in slower response times, inconsistent pricing, and unnecessary engineering involvement in routine quotations.
Solution
We designed a native Microsoft 365 solution consisting of two integrated applications that automate the complete quotation lifecycle.
Outlook Intake Agent
A custom Outlook Add-in monitors incoming quotation requests and uses Azure OpenAI to analyze customer emails. The AI extracts structured information including requested products, quantities, delivery destinations, and customer requirements. The extracted request is validated and automatically forwarded to the quotation engine.
Excel Quotation Engine
A custom Excel Add-in receives the structured RFQ and generates a draft quotation automatically. Azure Functions orchestrate the entire pricing workflow by retrieving supplier prices, calculating freight, handling costs, overhead, airline surcharges, and applying configurable pricing and margin rules. Supplier price lists stored in both Excel and PDF formats are processed using Azure AI Document Intelligence, allowing the system to work with multiple document layouts without manual preparation. The generated quotation is presented inside Excel together with an AI-powered sidebar built using Office.js and React. Users can review pricing, ask questions, modify assumptions using natural language, and regenerate quotations without manually editing formulas. Completed quotations are stored in SharePoint and submitted through an approval workflow before being shared with customers.
Technology Stack
- Frontend: React, TypeScript, Office.js, Microsoft Office Add-ins
- Backend: Azure Functions (Node.js), REST APIs
- AI & Document Processing: Azure OpenAI (GPT-4o), Azure AI Document Intelligence (Form Recognizer)
- Microsoft Ecosystem: Outlook Add-in, Excel Add-in, Microsoft Graph API, Microsoft Entra ID (Azure AD), SharePoint Online
- Data: Azure Blob Storage, Excel Workbooks, PDF Supplier Pricelists