Case Study

Inventory Matching Engine

Turning vague tender lists into accurate, automatic quotes in seconds instead of hours.

Industry Wholesale Distribution
Timeline 2 Weeks
Focus AI + Automation

The Challenge

A wholesale distribution company received customer tender lists — vague, generic descriptions of what was needed. No product IDs, no exact product names, just everyday language like “heavy duty black bags” or “blue roll towels”. These lists went out to multiple sellers for competitive quotes.

To respond, staff had to manually search the inventory system for every item on the list, one by one, trying to match vague descriptions to actual products. The system had no fuzzy search, so anything that didn’t match exactly was invisible. They then had to assemble the quote by hand.

Hours lost per quote Staff spent hours manually searching inventory for every line on the tender list
Vague inputs, no fuzzy search Generic customer descriptions couldn’t be matched by an exact-match-only inventory system
Missed and incorrect items Items were missed from quotes or matched to the wrong product, leading to errors in the final order

What We Built

We built a matching engine that sits between the incoming tender list and the inventory system, with an automatic quote builder on the other side.

Vector Embeddings

Every inventory item is embedded as a vector, so the system understands what products are — not just what they’re called.

Semantic + Fuzzy Matching

Vague tender descriptions are matched to real inventory items using vector similarity and fuzzy string matching — handling abbreviations, colloquial names, and typos.

Review & Approve

Staff review the matched list and approve it. High-confidence matches are pre-selected; ambiguous items are flagged for a quick decision rather than a full manual search.

Automatic Quote Generation

Once the matched list is approved, the system builds the full quote automatically — no manual assembly, no copy-paste, no missed lines.

The Results

Before Hours/quote
After Minutes/quote

Manual inventory lookup and quote assembly replaced by review-and-approve workflow

Before Item-by-item
After Whole list

Entire tender list matched against inventory in seconds, quote built automatically on approval

Before Missed items
After Complete

Semantic matching finds products that exact-match search missed, eliminating errors in final orders

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