Proposal engineering: two days down to hours
A chain of specialist agents for a water-treatment EPC firm that turns a CRM lead into a reviewed 15–25 page technical proposal, with technology selection, equipment sizing, process chart and budgetary costing.
The situation
In water treatment, every proposal is an engineering decision: which process train, which equipment, what capacity, and what it costs today. Each one took a senior engineer about two days, which capped how fast sales could grow.
Constraints we designed around
- The valuable part is how engineers choose technologies, not the writing.
- Historical prices are unreliable — EPC costs move by 30% or more.
- Nothing reaches a client without an engineer's approval.
What we built
An engineering brain
Retrieval over the firm's historical proposals, combined with deterministic rules, captures how technologies and processes are selected for a given brief.
A separate costing engine
Costs come from a maintained reference table rather than old quotes, so budgetary estimates stay current as prices move.
Seven specialist agents
Requirement interpreter, technology selector, equipment planner, costing, process chart, writer and assembler — each passes structured data to the next instead of one giant prompt.
A section-level review loop
Engineers approve or request changes section by section. Only the affected section is regenerated, then reviewed again.
Deployment
Runs in the client's own environment: n8n on a client-owned VPS, connected to Zoho CRM. No shared platform holds their data.
Outcomes
- to a reviewable first draft
- 2 days → hours
- to a reviewable first draft
- specialist agents in the chain
- 7
- specialist agents in the chain
- page proposals assembled
- 15–25
- page proposals assembled
Stack
- n8n
- Zoho CRM
- RAG
- Rules engine
- Document generation
- Diagram generation