Customer Overview
Edward Don (A Sysco Company) is one of the nation’s leading distributors of foodservice equipment and supplies, serving restaurants, hospitality groups, healthcare systems, educational institutions, and other institutional buyers across the United States. Operating six full-service distribution centers with more than 12,000 products in stock, the company supports over 56,000 customers nationwide with a team of 400+ experienced sales representatives and a dedicated delivery network. As part of Sysco, Edward Don manages complex, high-volume RFQs where speed and accuracy directly impact customer experience and project timelines.
The Challenge
As project volume increased, Edward Don faced growing pressure to turn complex RFQs into accurate, customer-ready quotes faster. Large commercial kitchen builds and multi-location rollouts often required hundreds of line items across equipment, smallwares, disposables, and sanitation products. Edward Don’s CIO, Tim Walter expressed: “We used to lose business because we couldn’t turn around information quickly."
The quoting process also required manual data transfer across multiple systems. Cross-referencing, pricing, contract adjustments, and inventory checks had to be completed separately, which added time and increased the risk of errors before a quote could be finalized. Quoting also created friction in several areas:
- Manual RFQ preparation: requests arrived in multiple formats and required interpretation, cross-referencing, and validation across systems before pricing could begin.
- Specification-heavy line items: supplies and equipment quotes required careful product matching and brand alignment.
- Long turnaround cycles: complex RFQs could take weeks, or even months, to complete.
- Lost opportunities: delays in responding meant potential business was sometimes lost before a quote was delivered.
The biggest issue was the time and effort required to prepare complex RFQs at scale.
The Solution
To accelerate project quoting without disrupting established sales workflows, Edward Don implemented SETVI Auto RFQ to bring RFQ intake and preparation into a structured, repeatable workflow across teams. Rather than replacing human expertise, the system was designed to learn from it, capturing sales knowledge and applying it across future quotes. SETVI supported the quoting process in practical ways:
- Structured RFQ Automation: large bids and RFPs are transformed into organized, quote-ready line items with AI-driven matching and explained confidence scoring.
- Knowledge sharing across teams: decisions made by experienced reps informed future recommendations, reducing reliance on individual expertise.
- Managing by exception: sales teams reviewed prepared quotes, focused on adjustments and refinements, rather than building every quote from scratch.
- Human-in-the-loop learning: rep feedback continuously improved recommendations over time.
Importantly, sales teams retained full control of final pricing, product selection, and customer communication. The goal was not automation for its own sake; it was reducing preparation time so teams could respond to complex RFQs faster and more consistently.
The Results
Restructuring how complex RFQs were prepared allowed Edward Don to significantly reduce quote turnaround time while maintaining full sales control. Large projects that once required weeks, or even months, could now be delivered in hours. The operational impact included:
- 68% faster quote turnaround: quotes that once took months now take weeks, and those that took weeks are delivered in a matter of days
- 90%+ of manual product cross-referencing automated by SETVI AI: sales reps redirected time from building quotes to refining proposals and winning complex projects
- 210,000+ products matched in just 8 months: saving more than 7,000 hours of labor
- Return on Investment (ROI) achieved in just 5 months: delivering fast operational improvements and measurable cost benefits
The adoption of SETVI Auto RFQ allowed a lean sales organization to scale its output, doing more with less while maintaining full control of the quoting process.The adoption of SETVI Auto RFQ allowed a lean sales organization to scale its output, doing more with less while maintaining full control of the quoting process.
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