Industries · Manufacturing and industrial

The spec exists. The question is whether it reaches the person answering.

Buyers compare materials, tolerances, certifications, turnaround and total cost — and they shortlist before they ever talk to a salesperson. The answers sit in spec sheets, past proposals and the heads of senior engineers.

Built for proposal and bid teams, applications engineering, and commercial operations.

One knowledge layer, and every workflow you add draws on the same approved answers. That is why the second one costs less than the first.

01

Customer RFQs and RFPs

First workflow live

Materials, tolerances and lead time answered before the shortlist closes.

02

Quality and certification questionnaires

Same answers, second document

IATF, AS9100 and material certs, from the certificates already on file.

03

Supplier qualification

Once the foundation holds

Capability and capacity questions answered without pulling a senior engineer off the line.

  • Applications engineering
  • Quality
  • Pricing
  • Sales

Tribble Brain

  • KnowledgeEvery approved answer, with the document it came from
  • GovernanceAn owner, a version and a review state on each one
  • AutomationThe same answer, wherever in the business it is asked for
  • Specs and tolerancesDrawings, materials, finish, dimensional limits, test methods
  • CertificationsISO 9001, IATF 16949, AS9100, material and process certs
  • Application notesPrior builds, failure modes, field performance data
  • Pricing rulesTooling amortisation, volume breaks, index clauses, minimum runs
  • Capacity and lead timeLine availability, tooling status, expedite terms
  • Prior RFQsQuoted, won or lost, and the reason recorded either way

Fed fromERP and MES · PLM · CRM · SharePoint · Slack and Teams · certificate library · prior RFQ library

Buyers shortlist before they talk to anyone. The quote has to be right the first time it is read.

Where the bid actually slows down.

Not for want of engineering. The answer has been worked out already, usually more than once. The question is whether it reaches the person in front of the customer.

  • 01

    The bid and RFQ desk

    Proposal teams rebuild RFQ and RFP responses from prior proposals scattered across folders and inboxes.

    The same security, quality-certification and materials-handling questionnaire arrives in a new format from every customer, and senior applications engineers spend their days answering repeat questions instead of solving new ones.

    Engineering time priced as sales overhead.

  • 02

    Sales and service answers

    Customers ask about product selection, material compatibility, design guidance, capacity and post-processing — questions whose approved answers live in different product groups.

    Regional teams give the same customer different answers. When a tenured applications engineer leaves, the customer feels it in week one.

    One company, several technical positions.

  • 03

    Knowledge operations

    Product, materials and process knowledge sits in separate systems per business unit, so cross-sell from hardware to materials to services stays tribal.

    Every acquisition and product launch adds knowledge that takes years to surface, or never does.

    Every acquisition adds a store of knowledge nobody outside it can search.

What Tribble does about it.

One place the approved answer lives, with the source attached and an owner’s name on it — and every response you finish makes the next one cheaper.

  1. 1

    Load it

    Your approved sources come in with their permissions and versions intact, so every answer can be traced back from day one.

  2. 2

    Answer from it

    Answers are worked out before anyone asks. Each one shows the document it came from, who owns that document and when it was last changed.

  3. 3

    Keep what you learn

    Every edit a reviewer makes becomes the approved answer next time. Your experts see the 10–20% that’s genuinely new, not all of it. The tenth submission is faster than the first.

Diagram: the answer loop 2100 × 800

Sources in, cited answer out, reviewer edits folded back.

The documents a manufacturer actually files.

All of them run the same way. Follow any one through to see it.

What we would measure.

Agreed up front, and measured against how the work runs today, so the result is judged on your numbers.

Time to approved answerOn RFQs, RFPs and certification packets
First-pass qualityShare of outputs citing a governed source at acceptable quality
Expert review burdenApplications engineering time against a target of reviewing the 10–20% that’s genuinely new
Regional consistencyWhether two regions quote the same spec, commitment and rate
Cross-product referralsBundling conversations started from approved language
Prep and rampPre-call prep time, and how long a new sales engineer takes to be useful

Proof.

The same job, in other industries: a few hundred technical questions, several people who own the answers, one deadline the buyer set.

200 questions, under an hourClari, on a single RFPRead the story →
93% first passSalesforce, on a 973-question RFP
$864K in year oneUiPath, with 5 FTE of productivity returned

The first engagement: one workflow, four to six weeks.

Narrow scope is what makes that real rather than aspirational. One team, one workflow, and we measure how it works today before changing anything.

  1. 1

    Connect · week 0

    Scope and owners named. Sources ingested from spec sheets, past proposals, application notes and certification records. We measure how the work runs today first.

  2. 2

    Build · weeks 1–2

    The answer set assembled from your own records, scoped to the questions that actually recur. Your experts review and approve it.

  3. 3

    Pilot · weeks 3–4

    Live with a named team, on real work. Our team works alongside yours, tuning against what reviewers actually change.

  4. 4

    Prove · weeks 5–6

    Measured against the baseline, with a clear read on where value landed and a go or no-go on expanding.

What people ask

Some are worth putting to your own team first.

Our materials data is confidential. How is that handled?

Sources are permissioned and versioned on intake, so access follows the permissions you already set. That’s also the direct argument against the alternative most companies are living with right now, which is staff pasting customer and application context into consumer AI tools because it’s the fastest thing available.

Does this replace our product documentation or PLM?

No. There’s no migration and no rip-and-replace — Tribble connects to the systems already running and renders inside the tools people already use. The point is that the spec you already maintain becomes the answer the bid desk and the field give, rather than a document someone has to go and find.

What happens when a specification or certification changes?

You change it once. It applies on the next response and the next conversation, in every region, rather than requiring a retraining cycle to propagate. That’s the difference between a governed source and a set of regional copies that drift.

How is this different from a proposal library?

A library stores answers but doesn’t know which are stale, which contradict the current spec, or which were edited after review. Tribble drafts each answer from approved sources with source, owner and version attached, routes low-confidence answers to the accountable engineer, and folds reviewer edits back in so the tenth packet is faster than the first.

Where would you start?

The narrowest slice that carries real volume: RFQ and RFP response, the recurring quality and certification questionnaire, or onboarding knowledge for the sales-engineer floor. One workflow, we measure how the work runs today, then measure it again at the end.

Bring one RFQ and one certification packet.

We’ll map what already exists across spec sheets, past proposals and application notes, run both together, and leave you with drafts your engineers can review.

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