Quick Summary

Puget Sound Pipe & Supply, a wholesale plumbing and pipe distributor in Washington, uses an AI quoting tool that reads customer requests from email, spreadsheets or photos and matches them to the catalog. A 100-line bid that took an experienced rep an hour to an hour and a half now takes about five minutes.

The Use Case

Inside sales reps built quotes by keying each line into the ERP using product shortcuts, and even the fastest reps needed over an hour for a large bid. New reps lacked the product knowledge to match items at all, so senior staff got pulled in to help. Customer-specific rules such as approved product lists and domestic-only preferences added more steps. The distributor deployed Canals, which accepts the request however the customer sent it, matches every line to a catalog item (including substitutes), learns each rep's habits and each customer's preferences, and returns a quote for the rep to review and confirm.

Real Example

1. A contractor emails a photo of a handwritten list of 100+ fittings and pipe lengths
2. The rep forwards it to the quoting tool
3. The tool matches each line to a catalog SKU, applying the customer's approved product list and domestic-only rule
4. Lines it cannot match with confidence are highlighted for the rep
5. The rep confirms the matches and adjusts two substitutions in a couple of minutes
6. The quote goes out, and the rep uses the saved hour to follow up on last week's open bids

Why It Matters

• Complex bids dropped from 60 to 90 minutes to about 5
• Time savings of at least 3 to 4x for experienced reps and 8 to 10x for newer ones, which shortens onboarding
• "If our volume doubled tomorrow, we'd be ready," per Travis Bryant, Inside Sales Manager

Source

https://www.canals.ai/case-studies/puget-sound-pipe-and-supply-slashes-quote-times