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Case study: Contractor, regulated industry

RFP and Proposal Automation

A contractor working in a highly regulated industry was burning hours searching hundreds of past RFPs to re-answer the same questions. Now new RFPs arrive pre-drafted from their own approved answer library, and the team's bidding capacity grew without a single new hire.

How the proposal drafting pipeline worksAn employee drops a new RFP into a SharePoint folder inside the client's own Microsoft 365 tenant, so no data leaves their environment. The pipeline extracts its questions with complex tables preserved intact, the detail that breaks most document automation. Each question is then matched against a private library of hundreds of previously approved answers, searched by meaning rather than keywords. The system only ever reuses approved wording; it never generates a freeform answer, which is what makes every draft compliant by default. It assembles a branded Word document with formatting and tables intact and emails it to the proposal team. A human refines and approves every proposal before it is submitted; nothing goes out without review. Since the pipeline went live, bidding capacity has grown without adding proposal staff, and the team's time has moved from hunting old answers to refining responses and pricing strategy.THE DRAFTING PIPELINESHAREPOINTA new RFP arrivesan employee drops it into a folderQuestions extractedcomplex tables preserved intactthe detail most automation breaks onMatched to approved answersretrieval over their own libraryApproved wording onlyFreeform generationCOMPLIANT BY DEFAULTanswers are reused, never inventedBranded Word draft assembledPython-templated, formatting and tables intactHUMAN APPROVES EVERY DRAFTEmailed to the proposal teamrefined and approved before it goes outnothing is submitted without reviewWHERE IT RUNSMICROSOFT 365Runs in their tenantno data leaves their environmentSharePoint, Word, and emailMicrosoft Graph the whole way throughSTAYS IN THEIR TENANTANSWER LIBRARYHundreds of approved answersevery past RFP, searchablematched to each new questionby meaning, not just keywordsthe source is never a blank pageWHAT CHANGEDBidding capacity grewwithout adding proposal stafftime moved from searchingto refining and pricingSAME TEAM, MORE BIDS

The challenge

  • Every new RFP asked questions the team had answered before, somewhere, in hundreds of past documents
  • Finding those answers meant manually searching SharePoint, proposal after proposal
  • The search work, not the writing, was the ceiling on how many bids the company could pursue

What we built

An automated drafting pipeline inside the client's existing Microsoft 365 environment. Employees drop a new RFP into a SharePoint folder. The system extracts its questions with complex tables intact, searches a private library of previously approved answers, assembles a branded Word draft, and emails a review link to the proposal team. Humans refine and approve; nothing goes out without review.

  • Runs on the client's own Microsoft 365 tenant, so no data leaves their environment
  • Answers come only from the approved answer library, so drafts start compliant
  • Complex tables preserved through extraction, the detail that breaks most document automation

How it's built

Docker containers orchestrated by n8n, a retrieval pipeline over a Qdrant vector database, Microsoft Graph integration, and Python-driven Word templating. Production infrastructure in a regulated environment, not a no-code experiment.

Results

  • Manual document searching eliminated from the proposal workflow
  • Bidding capacity up without adding proposal staff
  • Team time moved from hunting old answers to refining responses and pricing strategy

What's the search-and-retype bottleneck in your business?

If compliance-heavy proposals in a regulated industry can draft themselves safely, your quotes, reports, or applications can too.