— Cases
How a plumbing company cut its quotes from 45 to 8 minutes
45 Minutes Per Quote: The Daily Time Sink
M. runs a plumbing company in the canton of Zurich with 12 employees. Every quote went through the same inquiry storm: the customer calls, an employee collects details on site, in the evening the boss writes everything into a Word document, calculates, formats, converts to PDF, sends by email.
**Average: 45 minutes per quote. At 50 quotes per month: 37 hours.**
"I was often in the office until 9 p.m. just to get the quote out. My family barely saw me."
Where the Other 40 Minutes Actually Go
We shadowed M. for a week. The core was not the writing — that takes 5 minutes. The other 40 minutes were spent on:
1. Collecting information across three channels (call, WhatsApp, email) 2. Manually recalculating material prices in an old Excel sheet 3. Formatting the layout (always different) 4. PDF conversion and attachment check 5. Individual email with personal cover text
**Realisation:** 85% of the time was repetitive structure — three classic time-wasters in SMEs, not creative work.
Four Steps to an 8-Minute Quote
1. Channel Input Instead of three channels: one web form. The customer fills in the fields themselves — room size, age of the system, budget preference, appointment request. That enables media-break-free document processing and saves 15 minutes per quote.
2. AI Draft Generation An n8n workflow reads the form data, searches the material price database and generates a structured quote text including hour estimate via OpenAI. Duration: 30 seconds.
3. Human Approval The draft lands in a dedicated Slack channel. An employee checks and confirms with an emoji. No rewriting, just control.
4. Quote in bexio Confirmed → n8n creates the quote in bexio, generates the PDF and sends it to the customer.
Before vs. After: The Numbers Speak
| Before | After | 45 min / quote | **8 min / quote** | 37 hrs / month | **~7 hrs / month** | High error rate (forgotten prices) | **Error rate ~0%** | Boss in office until 9 p.m. | **Home on time** | Inquiries via WhatsApp | **100% structured input** |
|---|
Trust, Not Tech: The Real Hurdle
The biggest hurdle was not technical — it was **trust**. It is important to build trust in the process. The boss had to learn that AI doesn't replace a human, but pre-filters the work. After two weeks he said: "I still check every quote. But I check instead of write. That's a huge difference."
The workflow has now been running productively for 8 months. The monthly optimisation calls last 15 minutes — mostly just: "Everything's fine, let's keep running."
What Runs Under the Hood
- **Trigger:** Web form (n8n webhook)
- **Logic:** n8n workflow with OpenAI node
- **ERP:** bexio API
- **Approval:** Slack integration
- **Hosting:** Switzerland (self-hosted n8n)
If you want to automate similar processes: the first step is never a tool. The first step is a week of observation.
