Manufacturing
Automating Bridge Quotes at Premier Steel
How SEQTEK turned a manual, one-person quoting process into a cloud application that generates proposals in minutes.
15 minto quote a bridge and build the proposal, down from up to a full day
6inputs produce a complete bridge budget
5 yrsof new features since launch
The challenge
Premier Steel is a Tulsa steel fabrication company that works on structural projects such as schools and casinos across the South Central region. The company’s president set himself a challenge: design a bridge whose major components could be built and assembled in the shop, then shipped and put together in the field in a single day. The result was what he calls the Fast Cast bridge.
Quoting those bridges was slow and depended on one person. Each quote meant working out cost and profit for every bridge component, adding up the overall bridge budget, estimating freight, and then building a formal proposal by hand. The formulas lived on scraps of paper and in the president’s head, with no spreadsheet or central source of truth. A typical quote took about four hours, and some took a full day.
That created real limits for the business:
- Slow turnaround: A single quote could take up to eight hours of the president’s time.
- One point of failure: The knowledge behind every quote lived with one person, so the process couldn’t scale or be shared.
- Manual proposals: Proposals were assembled by hand, with no central view of what had been sent, won, or lost.
SEQTEK’s approach
SEQTEK started by getting the knowledge out of the president’s head. In about four weeks, the team turned his handwritten formulas into a validated Excel calculator, with every formula connected and checked through rounds of review, so that just six inputs could produce a complete, accurate bridge budget.
With the logic proven, SEQTEK built a cloud-based application on top of it. The president can now enter a few inputs, see the bridge budget populate, and generate a finished proposal automatically. The app also manages users and tracks every proposal’s status, from sent to won or lost. Development took about three months, and the application went live in early 2021.
The application is still in use today, and the partnership has continued since launch. Premier Steel reaches out whenever it has a new idea, and SEQTEK has added reseller access, a new calculator for its bottomless bridge design, and updates to the proposal output, with a new release as recently as October 2026.
The results
From 8 hours to 15 minutes
Quoting a bridge and building the proposal now takes about 15 minutes instead of up to a full day.
6 inputs, one complete budget
The president’s formulas now live in a validated system, so six inputs produce an accurate bridge budget without depending on one person.
Room to grow
Resellers can submit proposals on Premier Steel’s behalf and see only their own, while financial details stay protected.
A partnership that keeps going
Five years after launch, SEQTEK is still adding features as Premier Steel’s bridge designs evolve.
The business value
Fast Cast was a new business venture, and SEQTEK helped take it from an idea to an automated quoting tool. By capturing one person’s expertise in a system the team and its resellers can use, Premier Steel turned a bottleneck into a repeatable process that lets it quote the projects its new bridge design was built to win.