The buyer's questionnaire asks for the salt-spray test report. It exists. Nobody can find it before the deadline.

The situation

Why winnable bids go out late and thin

A typical OEM package runs 60 to 150 items: dimensional specs against drawings, material grades and sources, heat-treatment and coating processes, test evidence per standard, quality-system certificates, capacity and lead-time commitments, and compliance declarations — RoHS, REACH, conflict minerals. Each answer exists somewhere: a spec sheet, a lab report, the ISO certificate, last year's audit file.

"Somewhere" is the problem. The sales engineer who assembles bids spends most of the window hunting documents and re-asking the plant manager questions he answered for the last bid. Under deadline, the temptation is to copy the previous bid's answers — which is how a tolerance the line can no longer hold, or a test report that expired in March, ends up in a signed submission to a buyer whose incoming inspection will check.

Losing on price is acceptable. Losing because the response was late, incomplete, or contradicted by an audit is not — and that's the loss pattern the company can actually fix.

The work

What Taz builds for this manufacturer

Taz organizes the evidence once, then builds the repeatable desk that turns any incoming questionnaire into a requirement matrix with sourced draft answers and explicit flags.

• Source library organization: Spec sheets, drawings, test reports, certificates, and compliance declarations are inventoried with product mapping, issue and expiry dates, and owners. Expired and near-expiry documents surface immediately — before a buyer finds them.
• Product fact extraction: Locked-PDF spec data becomes structured product records: dimensions, tolerances, materials, processes, standards met, test evidence per claim. Each fact carries its source document and date.
• Requirement matrix per bid: Each incoming RFQ or questionnaire is decomposed line by line and mapped against the structured records: answerable-with-evidence, answerable-but-stale, or genuine gap requiring engineering input.
• Sourced draft answers: Draft responses cite their evidence — "tolerance per drawing D-4417 rev C; test report LR-2231, valid to 2027-03" — so the engineering lead reviews citations, not prose from memory.
• Red-flag pass: Every draft is checked for commitments the evidence doesn't support: capacity promises beyond documented capability, expired test reports, certificates in renewal, and tolerance claims tighter than the drawing. Flags route to the plant manager before anything is submitted.

The deliverable

What the manufacturer receives

• Organized evidence library — the document inventory with product mapping, validity dates, owners, and an expiry watchlist.
• Structured product records — specs, tolerances, materials, and test evidence as queryable data, each fact traced to its source document.
• Requirement matrix workflow — the repeatable decompose-map-draft-flag process, with templates the sales engineer runs on every new bid.
• Completed pilot bid — one real buyer package processed end-to-end during the engagement: matrix, sourced drafts, flags, and the submission-ready document, proving the turnaround on a live opportunity.
• Gap and renewal worklist — every claim the current evidence cannot support and every document expiring within twelve months, as a prioritized list for engineering and quality.