The problem
Vendor quotes arrive as PDFs, spreadsheets, email text and attachments — in different formats, in different languages, with different assumptions about currency, lead time and validity. Comparing them consistently is manual work that eats an entire afternoon per RFQ.
Arhan Technologies is a cross-border industrial trading business connecting Japanese vendors with Indian manufacturing buyers. We implemented a custom quotation-operations platform covering the complete RFQ-to-client-quotation lifecycle.
RFQ intake and vendor coordination
The system captures enquiries from channels including email, IndiaMART and phone calls; creates structured RFQ records; sends standardised enquiries to relevant vendors; tracks responses; and organises all communication under the correct RFQ.
Structured vendor comparison
Vendor quotations received through PDFs, spreadsheets, email text and attachments are parsed into comparable fields — price, currency, lead time, validity, payment terms, delivery terms and technical remarks. The data is synchronised with a live Google Sheets comparison view, after which the selected commercial option can be converted into a branded client quotation.
- Approval workflows that route quotations to the right internal reviewer.
- Quotation versioning — every revision preserved with a diff and a reason.
- Activity logs across the RFQ lifecycle for audit and coaching.
- Centralised status tracking so no RFQ falls through the inbox.
Quotation-preparation effort dropped from up to 120 minutes per RFQ package to approximately 10 minutes of human review.
What changed
The implementation replaced a scattered, inbox-heavy workflow with a structured and scalable operating system. Vendor tracking, quotation consistency, auditability and management visibility all improved significantly — and the team is no longer the bottleneck as volume scales.