ABB: Harnessing generative AI to revolutionize quotation processes and free time for sales and marketing teams
Slashing the time taken to respond to RFQs
With request-for-quotation (RFQ) inquiries taking days to process, electrical engineering company ABB India Limited looked for a way to speed up its response to customers. It deployed a generative AI–enabled solution based on SAP Business AI, helping it get back to customers faster and freeing salespeople to spend more time striking deals.
| Industry | Region | Company Size |
| Industrial manufacturing | Bengaluru, India | 3,625 employees |
day to respond to complex RFQs, down from up to 20 days.
days of anticipated annual time savings.
in anticipated annual cost savings.
Marketing Manager, ABB India Limited
Providing customers with complex quotations—at scale
Connecting engineering know-how with software, ABB’s products help optimize how things are manufactured, moved, powered, and operated. With a presence in India for more than a century, the company provides power and automation technologies to customers within the utility, transport, and infrastructure sectors.
For sales and marketing teams at ABB, answering RFQs was a painstaking and time-consuming task. The company receives up to one million requests each year, with each document ranging from 50 to 500 pages. Often dealing with complex engineer-to-order scenarios, each question must be responded to and the most suitable products must be recommended—a process that could take up to 20 days.
The company wanted to reduce the time spent by salespeople on manual RFQ handling and enable them to spend more time following up on sales opportunities. To this end, the company looked for an AI-enabled solution that would speed up the quotation process through automation.
Automating RFQ processing with generative AI technology
ABB’s development and digitalization department played a crucial role in identifying the technology for building the new RFQ processing solution. The team analyzed AI solutions from a number of vendors before selecting SAP Business AI. Straightforward integration with the company’s existing SAP software landscape was a key factor in this decision.
Collaborating closely with experts from SAP Services and Support, the IT team at ABB created an architecture for the new RFQ processing solution based on SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP). This uses the SAP Document AI solution to extract structured data from the unstructured RFQ documents. The data is then automatically uploaded to the generative AI hub capability based on the SAP AI Core infrastructure and SAP AI Launchpad.
The AI technology analyzes the RFQ data to prepare a technical bill of materials (BOM), identifying the most relevant products from the ABB product catalog. Users can review the final quotation documents created by the AI-enabled solution, and each of these is stored for future reference, giving salespeople a head start on the process if they receive similar RFQs from other customers.
Vice President, ABB India Limited
Improving quotation accuracy while cutting response times
While ABB is still on its journey to streamline RFQ processes using AI, the company has already seen some impressive benefits. For large tenders, which make up around 20% of inquiries, time to respond to customers has been reduced by one day. What’s more, for the remaining 80% of RFQs for small and medium projects, the time reduction is four days. Over the course of a year, this has the potential to deliver time savings of more than one million FTE days. And this could translate to millions of dollars in savings.
The use of an automated, AI-enabled solution to produce the technical BOMs that quotations are based on eliminates the risk of manual errors—resulting in salespeople being able to send more accurate responses to their customers. Meanwhile, more-efficient RFQ handling improves customer experiences by more rapidly providing the information needed to make a purchasing decision.
Marketing Manager, ABB India Limited
Working closely with SAP experts to add additional functionality
Following a successful launch of the AI-enabled solution, ABB is now looking to add to it by using AI to support more of the RFQ-handling process, delivering further time-saving benefits. To this end, the ABB IT team is currently workshopping an uplift in the capabilities of the solution in consultation with SAP experts, exploring ways that SAP Business AI can help support end-to-end RFQ processing.
ABB is also considering other ways that AI-driven solutions based on SAP BTP can help improve operational efficiency, looking at using AI bots created with the SAP Build Process Automation solution to automate and streamline processes. In addition, the company is exploring how the Joule copilot can help boost productivity by providing timely business insights to users.