Turning a manual fee proposal process into a repeatable, traceable one.
Clear Build designed, built and verified a five-link proposal chain for a UK professional engineering consultancy, together with the controls that stop it inventing a number. The interesting part is not the elapsed time. It is what stops the machine producing a plausible figure.
- Sector
- UK professional engineering consultancy
- Engagement
- Build, delivered as a chain of linked tools running on the firm's own pricing model
- Result
- About 30 to 40 minutes all in, client-reported, one engagement
The facts that set the fee are scattered through a pack nobody has time to read.
A tender or enquiry pack arrives. It is large, it is unstructured, and the handful of facts that determine the fee are scattered through it.
Someone has to open it, work out which of hundreds of files matter, pull out the pricing-relevant facts, apply the firm's own pricing model, and write the proposal.
The work is repetitive, it is done under time pressure, and it is done by the most expensive person available, because judgement is needed at every step. It cannot safely be handed downwards in its current form.
Five linked steps, a conductor, and three points where a person has to approve.
Each of the five links does one job and hands on a structured record rather than prose. A conductor sequences them, and at three points nothing moves on until a person has approved.
- Triage reads the whole pack, classifies and scores every file, deep reads only the shortlist, and produces a manifest that gives a reason for every file decision. Nothing is skipped silently.
- Intake captures every fact the pricing step needs into one structured record. Each field is confidence-rated and tagged with the source that produced it.
- Pricing is code, not a language model, reproducing the firm's own pricing model. The model is the authority and the code follows it, never the reverse.
- Drafting builds a deterministic skeleton first, then writes prose only inside that skeleton, around figures that have already been traced.
- Assembly builds the document onto the firm's own template, producing a report that records where every value on the page came from.
What stops it producing a plausible number.
The chain is built so that the easy failure, a confident figure with nothing behind it, cannot happen quietly.
- A task with no catalogue price raises a flag asking for a human price. Never a guessed number, never a zero.
- Intake validation writes a receipt bound to the file's bytes, and the calculator refuses to price an intake that has no receipt.
- Two independent mechanical gates sit on the draft, one checking shape against a published schema and one checking content honesty. Both must pass or the draft hard stops.
- Anything the chain cannot honestly source renders as a highlighted token for a person to answer, rather than as a plausible number.
- The review page is deliberately read-only, so approval cannot be faked by a click. There is no approve button.
- The figure approved at the pricing gate is checked against the figure in the issued document, and a difference has to be named rather than shipped quietly.
Two figures, two different kinds of figure.
Clear Build's judgement, from working in the sector, is that the same proposal typically takes a senior consultant about half a day of focused effort.
Sector judgement, not a timed study.
The client reports that a fee proposal now takes about 30 to 40 minutes all in.
Client-reported, one engagement.
On that estimate, the chain would remove about 80 percent of that estimated time.
Derived from a judgement baseline and rounded down, so it is itself a judgement.
Built on tooling a firm can already licence.
The chain was built as a skill chain running on Claude, so it sits on general-purpose tooling a firm can already licence rather than on a bespoke platform. Where higher data or intellectual property security is needed, the same logic can be built as custom software and deployed inside a client tenant.
No client quote appears on this page. Consent to name the client or to publish a quote was not sought, so none is published.