Electrical Contracts Association (ECA) is the leading trading association for electrotechnical companies and technical engineering projects around the UK. When they started working with us, they were struggling with a time-consuming manual process of creating proposals. They needed to create the proposals quickly as highly targeted sales resources, but their current system wasn’t very efficient. Our task was to develop an alternative solution to solve this problem.
The answer was an automated Proposal Generator. The project meant building various online web pages - including asset uploading and proposal generation - to create a streamlined, automatic process for the ECA sales team.
User-Friendly Proposal Generator
We put a heavy focus on ensuring the Proposal Generator was fast, high performing, and user friendly. We didn’t want staff to have to go through rigorous training to use the system, but for it to be intuitive and simple whilst doing its job effectively. All of these things were factored into the creation of the system. We created a high-functioning sales resource from a repository of uploaded PDF assets.
Auto-Generation of Opening and Closing Pages
The opening and closing pages of proposals are monotonous to produce and follow the same structure and rules. It made sense to automate this process and remove laborious work. We created a process that would auto-generate these pages based on client turnover, client name, and the selected package.
Quick Uploading of PDFs
PDFs featured prominently in this project and were used frequently by the ECA team. We made it simple to upload PDF documents to the Proposal Generator and to segment them by client turnover and category. This system makes it easy for staff to stay organised, and the storage of documents is consistent.
An Intuitive Interface
We provided the sales team with an intuitive interface to navigate the system. It was designed to help them rapidly find and combine the PDF sales assets they needed for specific proposals, creating highly-targeted sales resources quickly.
Smart Asset Uploading System
Asset uploading had to be easy and cohesive, ensuring that the sales team could upload everything they needed to create proposals. But, it also had to be smart. Not only can the team upload assets, but they can also prevent old documents from being accidentally sent to clients, reducing human error. This works by setting a date range that the assets uploaded are available. They can also tag assets to provide extra context when uploading them to the Proposal Generator.
The Technology Stack
To create the back end of the Proposal Generator, we used PHP framework Yii2. For the database, we used MySQL. For the front end, we used React based on JavaScript
