A customer asks for a price and the survey goes into a drawer
A managing agent asks for a modernisation quote on two passenger lifts in an office building. Your senior engineer spends a morning surveying: car and landing measurements, shaft photos, the controller and drive, doors, signalling, the machine room. Notes go into a notebook and photos into a phone. Then the engineer is back on breakdowns for a fortnight.
When the estimator finally sits down with the job, the notes are hard to read and three photos are missing. Supplier quotes for the controller package and door equipment have to be requested, and one supplier replies in a PDF that needs working through line by line. The proposal is built by opening the last modernisation quote and editing it, which is how a previous customer's building name ended up on page six of the one before.
By the time the quote goes out, the agent has chased twice and mentioned another firm has already quoted.
Where the time actually goes
Estimating a modernisation is skilled work, and nobody wants it rushed. But most of the elapsed time is not estimating. It is waiting and rework around it.
- Survey information is unstructured, so the estimator has to re-read and interpret it.
- Missing details mean a second site visit or a call to the engineer.
- Supplier requests are sent one at a time and tracked in the estimator's inbox.
- Options such as partial versus full modernisation are priced in separate spreadsheets.
- The proposal document is assembled by hand from an old one.
The work you lose while the quote waits
Modernisation projects are some of the largest pieces of work a lift company takes on, and they often decide who holds the maintenance contract for years afterwards. A slow quote is not just an irritated customer. It is a window in which a competitor can put a tidy proposal in front of them first.
Slow quoting also ties up your most experienced people. Senior engineers who survey are the same people you need on complex faults, and estimators spend their day on formatting instead of pricing judgement.
A quoting workflow that starts at the survey
We build a modernisation quoting workflow that captures the survey in a structured way, collects supplier prices against it and produces the proposal from the data. Pricing decisions stay with your estimator.
- A survey form on a tablet or phone walks the engineer through the details your estimator needs for each lift, with required photos for each section and fields that cannot be skipped.
- The completed survey creates a quote record per lift, with the surveyed components and dimensions attached.
- Supplier requests are generated from the survey and sent from the system. Replies are collected against the quote, and PDF price lists can be read into line items for the estimator to check.
- The estimator builds options, for example controller and drive only, or full modernisation with doors and signalling, in one place with labour and margin set by your own rules.
- The proposal document is generated from a template you control, pulling in the customer, site, survey photos, scope for each option and the prices the estimator has set.
- The quote record tracks status: surveyed, awaiting suppliers, priced, sent, followed up, won or lost.
| Stage | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Survey | Notebook and phone photos | Structured form with required photos |
| Supplier prices | Separate emails and PDFs | Collected against the quote |
| Options | Separate spreadsheets | Priced side by side |
| Proposal | Edited from an old quote | Generated from a template |
| Follow-up | From memory | Status and reminders on each quote |
We can place the generated document in Microsoft 365 or Google Drive so your estimator can finish the wording in Word or Docs as they do now.
What your estimator's week looks like after
The estimator opens a quote that already has a complete survey, every photo and supplier replies in one place. Their time goes on judgement: scope, programme risk, pricing. The proposal is formatted before they start writing the cover letter. Customers get a document that is consistent and names their building correctly.
Managers can see the pipeline too: how many modernisation quotes are out, which are waiting on suppliers and which have gone quiet.
Is this where your quotes get stuck?
- Surveys regularly need a second visit to fill gaps.
- Supplier prices are tracked in one person's inbox.
- New proposals are made by editing old ones.
- Customers chase you for modernisation quotes.
- You cannot quickly see how many quotes are outstanding.