From a working day to ten minutes

The client was a UK manufacturing SME (identity withheld for confidentiality) where quoting was historically a slow, expert-bound activity. Prices lived in spreadsheets and in the head of the sales director. Every quote was bespoke, every margin calculation involved judgement, and turnaround was measured in hours or days rather than minutes. The bottleneck was not effort, the team was working flat out, it was that the rules existed nowhere a junior could execute them without supervision.

I joined as the engineer responsible for changing that.

Over multiple years I designed, built and continuously refined a custom pricing engine for the business. The system encoded the sales director's rules as testable software: inputs were validated, rules executed deterministically, and outputs included a full breakdown the salesperson could explain to a customer on a phone call.

The work split into two phases, an initial build that replaced the manual process end to end, and an extended period of refinement: edge cases, new product types, performance, the operational realities you only discover once a tool is in daily use across a sales team. The job was not "ship a tool", it was "own the tool the business runs on, and improve it every week for years".

The simplest way to describe what changed is to repeat what a colleague said when he joined the company from a similar role at another manufacturer. He was running a quote through the system for the first time.

The quote he was working on would have taken him a full working day at his previous employer. With the tool, he had finished it in ten minutes.

That was the moment the work felt finished. Not because there was nothing left to improve, there always was, but because someone with deep industry experience had measured the gap between "the way this is usually done" and "the way it could be done", and the answer was an order-of-magnitude difference in their working day.

I'm Mohammad Etminan, founder of Etminan AI Solutions. I spent those years embedded inside a manufacturer's quoting process, learning what a working pricing engine actually needs: the rules, the edge cases, the operational guardrails, the conversation with the sales director who has to trust the output before the sales team will use it.

Etminan AI Solutions exists to bring that same discipline to other UK manufacturing SMEs. Different industries, different rules, same underlying problem: expert pricing knowledge trapped in the sales director's head and a fragile spreadsheet, holding back the sales team.

If that pattern sounds familiar, let's talk →