Quoting Automation for the Security Industry

The first phase focused exclusively on the core catalog and quote-building workflow before touching EDI or supply chain features.

Phase 2 introduced the supply chain layer: the three-tier connection between manufacturers, distributors, and installation companies, and the EDI integration that makes live data possible.

The catalog aggregates products across manufacturers and maps them to distributor availability and pricing. Adding products to a quote automatically calculates totals, applies the appropriate pricing tier, and flags compatibility issues between selected components. The quote output is formatted as a proposal document the installation company can send directly to the end customer - not a raw spreadsheet that needs reformatting.

FocusVue connects to distributors via EDI to pull live pricing and availability at the time a quote is built. A rep is never quoting from a catalog that may be weeks out of date. If a product is on backorder, the rep knows before the customer asks.

The interface surfaces the right level of supply chain detail for each role. Field reps see price and availability status. Administrators see account configuration, tier management, and approval workflows. The same underlying data is presented at different levels of detail by role, reducing cognitive load for users who do not need the full picture.

Touch targets, scrollable product lists, and the simplified line-item interface were tested on mobile device sizes throughout the design process. The quote builder is fully functional on a phone screen; administrator tools are optimized for tablet and desktop.

EDI is a powerful but opaque protocol. The data it carries is valuable; the way it is structured is not designed for human consumption. The solution was designing the UI from the user's mental model rather than the data model. A field rep thinks in terms of "does this distributor have this product and what does it cost me" - not in terms of EDI transaction sets. We mapped those user-facing questions to the underlying data and built the interface to answer them directly. The integration is invisible in normal use; it only surfaces when a product is unavailable and the rep needs to understand why.

The three-tier supply chain - manufacturer, distributor, installation company - involves parties with different interests and different information needs. Rather than designing a single interface with role-based permissions filtering features in or out, we designed distinct interface surfaces for each tier. The field rep experience and the administrator experience are genuinely different UI contexts. This added design scope but produced an interface that felt purposeful for each user type rather than a generic tool that partially served everyone.

The automated catalog and live EDI pricing eliminated the two most common sources of manual quoting error: selecting a discontinued product and quoting from an outdated price list. The structured quote builder also catches incomplete quotes - missing accessories, unlicensed software, or incompatible components - before they reach the customer.

Field reps who piloted FocusVue alongside their existing process adopted it as their primary quoting method within the first two weeks. Speed was consistently cited as the reason. Sales tools fail when they create more work than they save; treating speed as a first-class design requirement prevented that outcome.