AI Lead Scoring for Engineering: Cost the RFQs That Become Purchase Orders

In an engineering business the expensive resource is not the salesperson's time, it is the estimator's. Costing a fabrication or machining RFQ properly takes engineering hours, and most shops spend those hours in strict arrival order: the speculative enquiry from an unregistered trader gets the same careful costing as the drawing-complete RFQ from an OEM whose commissioning date is fixed. Quotes then leave the building and enter silence, chased irregularly, remembered selectively, and lost, when they are lost, for reasons nobody records.

Drawings are intent made visible

A dimensioned drawing with tolerances and material grades is procurement in progress: someone inside the buyer has specified, approved and budgeted a requirement. A verbal description or a photographed sketch is an idea. The distinction takes seconds to log at intake and predicts conversion better than the buyer's brand name does.

Registration and the pilot job

Industrial buying runs through gates: vendor registration first, a trial or pilot order second, the real volumes third. A completed registration means the commercial gate is open. A pilot order, however small its value, is the audition for everything that follows and should be scored, staffed and delivered like the large account it represents.

Dates connected to their world

A required-by date tied to the buyer's shutdown, commissioning or production plan is the strongest urgency signal in this trade, because their calendar, unlike their enthusiasm, cannot be faked. An RFQ with no date attached is a price survey until proven otherwise.

Completeness, registration and specificity set the base. Behaviour moves it: technical queries, visit requests, pilot discussions, fast replies. Dates add urgency approaching and decay past. Repeat-buyer cycles lift accounts as reorders come due. Every score opens to show its reasons, so the estimation head can defend the queue order in the morning meeting.

Add three intake fields and enforce them: drawings received yes or no, vendor registration status, required-by date and what drives it. Track quotations with decision dates and chase them on schedule. Stage pilot orders separately with senior owners. And close every RFQ with a true reason, won, price, delivery, never-serious, because the model learns your market from those endings, and so does your management review.

The score allocates attention; it does not cost parts, judge feasibility or set margins, and it makes no engineering decisions whatsoever. It reads only recorded activity, so the requirement mentioned at the industry exhibition does not exist for it until logged. It needs months of quoted-and-closed history before its ordering beats a good sales engineer's nose, and overrides with logged reasons are the intended way that nose keeps teaching the system.

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