Quoting a plumbing project from a bill of materials

A plumbing contractor does not shop, they submit a specification. Turning that into a quotation means resolving hundreds of line items against your catalogue, checking that the parts are compatible with each other, applying project pricing rather than list, and confirming what is actually available. Done by hand it takes a day, and it contains errors — usually the kind that arrive on site and stop work.

This is the single most expensive manual process in a pipes and fittings business, and it is almost entirely automatable.

Why is this harder than a normal quotation?

Four things compound, and each one on its own would be manageable.

The catalogue is enormous. Multiply material by diameter by pressure class by fitting type and you are into thousands of items before variants. Finding the right one is not browsing, it is filtering on four technical dimensions at once.

The items have rules. Diameter, pressure class, material and joining method all have to agree. A quotation pairing incompatible items is not a pricing error — it is a delivery that cannot be installed.

The input is not your catalogue. The contractor’s BOM uses their descriptions, their abbreviations, sometimes a competitor’s part numbers. Someone has to map several hundred lines onto your item codes.

The price is not list. Project pricing depends on the size of the job, the contractor, and often on what someone has already promised verbally.

Where does the time actually go?

Step	Done by hand	What goes wrong
Reading the BOM	Typing from a PDF or a printout	Transcription errors nobody catches
Matching to your catalogue	Searching item by item	The nearest match gets picked, not the right one
Checking compatibility	Memory, or a printed chart	Depends on who is quoting that day
Applying pricing	Spreadsheet, manually	Inconsistent between quotations
Checking availability	Phoning the godown	Position has changed by the time it is quoted
Producing the document	Formatting by hand	Hours, and it is not reusable

The second row is where the real cost sits. When someone cannot find an exact match under time pressure, they choose the nearest item. Sometimes that is fine. Sometimes it is a different pressure class, and nobody finds out until installation.

What should a quotation system do?

Accept the BOM as a file. A spreadsheet upload rather than retyping. This alone removes the transcription errors and most of the time.

Match automatically, and flag what it cannot. Most lines will match on description or specification. The system should resolve those and present the exceptions for a human decision, rather than requiring a human decision on all four hundred.

Enforce compatibility rather than trusting memory. If the quotation contains a fitting that does not match the specified pipe, it should not be possible to send it. This is the requirement that pays for the project — it converts a category of expensive site failures into an error message.

Apply pricing by rule. Project tiers, contractor-specific rates, volume breaks — applied consistently rather than by whoever is quoting.

Show availability alongside the price. A quotation for items you cannot supply within the project timeline wins a job you then disappoint.

Version the quotation. Project specifications change. Revising should mean adjusting a line, not rebuilding the document — and you should be able to see what changed between versions when the contractor queries a price.

What does matching actually involve?

The part that decides whether the system is useful, and the part most often underestimated.

Contractors write “110 SWR pipe 6m” or “4 inch CPVC elbow” or a competitor’s code. Your catalogue holds structured attributes. Bridging that means parsing the description into material, size and type, then matching against your items — and being explicit when confidence is low rather than guessing.

The practical approach is a matching layer that learns. Every time someone corrects a match, the correction is remembered, so the same phrasing resolves automatically next time. Within a few months most of what your regular contractors write is recognised, because contractors are consistent in their own descriptions even when they differ from each other.

This is one of the few places where a language model earns its place — reading unstructured descriptions is exactly what they are good at. The output still has to be validated against your catalogue rather than trusted, which we have written about in when a language model is the wrong tool.

What changes commercially?

You quote faster than competitors. On project work, the first credible quotation frequently sets the terms of the discussion.

You can quote jobs you previously declined. Businesses turn down large BOMs because the quoting effort is not worth it. That is capacity you already have, unused.

Margin stops leaking. Consistent pricing removes the quiet discounting that happens when someone quotes under pressure.

You learn what you lose. Quotations that did not convert, by contractor and by value, is a number most pipe businesses have never had.

Common questions

What if contractors send BOMs as PDFs or photographs?

Both are workable — a PDF extracts reasonably well, a photograph needs OCR and more checking. Ask for a spreadsheet where you can, because the accuracy is better and it costs the contractor nothing.

How accurate does automatic matching need to be?

Good enough to leave a manageable number of exceptions. If it resolves most lines and flags the rest clearly, a four-hundred-line BOM becomes a short review rather than a day’s work. Perfect matching is not the target.

Can this work if our catalogue data is inconsistent?

Only up to a point. Matching depends on structured attributes — material, diameter, class as fields rather than buried in a description. If your catalogue does not hold them that way, that is the first project. See what to digitise first.

Should dealers be able to quote this way too?

It is usually the strongest version of this. Contractors approach dealers, not manufacturers, so a dealer who can return a priced BOM the same day wins work — and every quotation gives you visibility of project demand you would otherwise never see.

More on this: why generic ERP breaks and choosing dealer management software. For how we work with this segment, see pipes & fittings.