The situation

An 18-person manufacturer in the Hunter region was sending around 60 quotes a month. The estimator logged each one into a shared Excel spreadsheet, but updates depended on memory and goodwill: by the time a quote aged two weeks, the spreadsheet was often a week behind. The general manager had no reliable way to see which quotes were in negotiation, which had been verbally approved but not followed up, and which had gone cold. Conversion sat at 41 percent, but the business suspected it was losing jobs not to price, but to follow-up gaps that nobody could see.

Hunter manufacturing is competitive. Customers compare multiple fabricators, and the business that responds fastest and follows through consistently tends to win. The problem was not the estimator's quoting ability. It was that once a quote left the building, it disappeared into a black box.

The flow we built

A Power Automate flow now watches the shared Excel template the estimator already uses:

  • When a new quote row is added, Power Automate syncs it to a SharePoint List with the customer name, quote value, product category, stage, and expected close date.
  • The stage field is updated by the estimator as conversations progress: Sent, In Discussion, Verbal Approval, Order Placed, Delivered.
  • Any quote sitting in the same stage for more than 14 days triggers an alert to the estimator and a task in Microsoft Planner.
  • Power BI refreshes the SharePoint List hourly and displays a funnel view, average days per stage, and a table of at-risk quotes flagged by the alert rule.

No new system was introduced. The estimator kept their Excel template. The rest was built around it.

The platforms

Power Automate for the sync and alert logic. SharePoint Lists as the central data store. Power BI for the live dashboard. The whole setup runs on a Professional Bot Care plan, so when Microsoft rolled an API permission change to SharePoint connector scopes the monitoring caught it within the hour and the flow was patched before any quotes fell through.

The results

Over the three months following deployment, quote-to-job conversion lifted from 41 to 59 percent. The general manager attributes most of the gain not to any single follow-up but to the consistency: every at-risk quote was flagged, and the estimator had a clear queue each Monday morning instead of relying on memory. The 14-day alert caught eight quotes in the first month that would previously have gone cold without a second contact. Three of those became jobs.

The insight was simple: the business was not losing quotes on price. It was losing them to silence. The dashboard made the silence visible, and that was enough to fix it.

What this could look like for your manufacturing business

If your quoting process relies on a spreadsheet that is always a version behind, a SharePoint and Power BI setup like this one can give your team live visibility without changing how your estimators work. Small business automation in Newcastle is exactly the kind of practical, low-disruption work we do across the Hunter region.