Automating bid intake for a commercial HVAC subcontractor
Michigan Mechanical Ventures, a Detroit subcontractor with commercial clients across the Midwest, was drowning in manual bid processing. We rebuilt the estimating intake as an intelligent pipeline.
The problem
The estimating team spent more than sixty hours a week reviewing RFPs, drawings and bid invitations from general contractors across four states. Each package held hundreds of pages to parse, categorise and key into estimating software. The team could answer roughly forty percent of opportunities; in peak season, estimators burned out and scope errors led to underbid projects.
What we built
An end-to-end bid ingestion pipeline that receives invitations by email and FTP, extracts and classifies documents with computer vision and language models, and structures the data for their estimating platform. It identifies HVAC and plumbing scope in drawings, flags addenda and change orders, and routes each package to the right estimator — integrated by API, with no manual entry.
The result
Processing fell from four hours per package to under twenty-five minutes. Response rate rose from forty to over eighty-five percent, capturing an estimated $2.3M in previously missed contracts in year one. Estimator overtime was eliminated and scope errors fell by three quarters.
