Puget Sound Pipe & Supply Slashes Quote Times and Unlocks Bandwidth for More Business

Travis Bryant manages Inside Sales at Puget Sound Pipe & Supply’s Burlington, WA branch and has spent over a decade with the company. Beyond quoting, he supports purchasing, inventory, accounts receivable, and vendor-managed replenishment.

Manual Meets Its Limit

Puget Sound Pipe & Supply’s quoting process was built on manual effort, institutional knowledge, and a system of product shortcuts that reps had developed over time. Even the most experienced users needed an hour or more to build large quotes, and newer team members often had to rely on managers or senior reps for guidance. 

While this approach worked, it left a lot of room for error and little time for follow-up or deeper customer engagement.

A 100 line item bid—even with inventory items and shortcuts—would still take me an hour to an hour and a half. And newer reps had to lean on senior folks just to figure out substitutes or where to look. It worked, but it was slow, and follow-up always came last.

For Josh Bensussen, Finance Manager at Puget Sound Pipe & Supply, streamlining quoting stood out as a way to improve efficiency. He brought the idea to Travis, who saw both the upside and the risks. Changing a well-worn process wasn’t something to take lightly, but the chance to ease the quoting burden and free up time, especially on large bids, made it worth a closer look.

Core challenges

• Manual quoting: Even with shortcuts, large quotes could take over an hour and required tribal knowledge to complete accurately
  
• Knowledge gaps: Newer reps leaned heavily on senior team members to find substitutes and navigate quoting tools
  
• Customer-specific preferences: Oil and gas clients required approved product lists and preferred domestic over imported items, adding complexity to selecting the right product
  
• Limited bandwidth for follow-up and growth: Time-consuming quoting left reps with little capacity to revisit bids or scale their volume

Quotes Out the Gate

Canals didn’t require heavy onboarding or IT lift. After just a few days of setup, it was ready for the team to use. Travis ran a 2.5-week beta with experienced reps, selected for their deep system knowledge. They took a hands-on approach—testing real quoting scenarios, troubleshooting directly, and learning alongside the tool.

Canals always found a way to read the customer input, whether it was a picture of a handwritten list or an Excel file filled with shorthands. While some early users didn’t get item matches right away, that changed quickly once they started quoting real accounts. The AI learns how each rep quotes and what specific customers need, improving suggestions over time.

We kind of used the terminology—like having a child or a pet. You gotta train it. You gotta show it what it needs to do before it’ll do it for you. The users that were using it the most were getting a high percentage of matches.

And that was despite a messy ERP catalog. The AI worked through it.

The Canals team was also fast, responsive, and clearly understood distributor quoting, adjusting quickly to Puget Sound Pipe & Supply’s needs without missing a beat.

Key benefits

• Accelerates quoting speed: Turns hour-long quotes into just a few minutes of reviewing and confirming item matches—even for large or complex bids
  
• Learns how each rep quotes: Improves accuracy over time by adapting to quoting patterns and customer needs
  
• Fast setup, minimal IT lift: Required no formal onboarding, training, or ERP customization, seamlessly integrating into existing Eclipse-based processes

Precision, Speed, and Performance (PSP)

For the Puget Sound Pipe & Supply team, the shift to Canals was swift and energizing. Tasks that once took over an hour were now done in minutes, freeing reps to follow up faster and focus on what actually drives revenue.

Even before adopting Canals, the team aimed to turn quotes around in 15 to 30 minutes—unless they were really complex. With Canals, some of those same quotes were going out in five.

At a minimum, I would say with an advanced user, the time savings is probably three or four to one. And with a less advanced user, it’s probably closer to eight or ten to one. I’m extremely impressed with the amount of time I can save with it.

That speed mattered. The sooner reps could respond, the sooner customers could move forward, and the sooner a new request would come in.

But it wasn’t just about speed. Accuracy improved, too. Travis himself admitted, “I’ve typed up some of these items tens of thousands of times—and still made mistakes. Once you teach Canals and it’s locked in, you’re cutting that error rate way down.” 

By automating the process, Canals removed the opportunity for manual errors, delivering cleaner, more consistent results every time.

That precision gave newer reps more confidence, too. Where they once leaned on senior teammates to interpret vague requests or track down substitutes, they were now quoting on their own. The knowledge that used to live in heads was now embedded in the system.

Business impact

• Increased efficiency: Complex bids are built in minutes, enabling reps to handle more without burnout
• Faster ramp: New reps get productive quickly and quote accurately with confidence
• Improved service: Reps can get back to customers faster and answer more questions
• Growing sales: The team spends more time following up on quotes and building customer relationships, helping win more business
  

Making Room for What’s Next

With Canals in place, quoting stopped dominating the day. The time once swallowed by manual entry, substitutions, and back-and-forth guesswork is now reinvested into long-deferred tasks. Projects that had sat low on the priority list for years could finally get attention.

One example? A long-dead product line that had been taking up warehouse space, marked for return but constantly pushed aside. After six years, Travis and his team were finally able to clear it out, reclaiming both time and physical room for lines that actually moved. As he put it, “we finally had the time to circle back to something that had been sitting around priority number 40 or 50.”

But the shift wasn’t just about catching up, it was about scaling up. Canals gave Puget Sound Pipe & Supply the headroom to take on more without compromising accuracy or customer responsiveness.

We’re having a very good year, and as far as the sales and operations sides of things go, it doesn’t feel like I’m working as hard. No taking things home on the weekend unless you get a call on a weekend. If our volume doubled tomorrow, we’d be ready. That’s the kind of confidence this gives us.

Advice for Other Distributors

Reclaiming hours each week adds up to game-changing impact.

For Puget Sound Pipe & Supply, the impact went beyond quoting faster, it was what that extra time made possible. Reps finally had the breathing room to follow up, stay proactive, and even tackle long-postponed priorities.

This helped us get to things that had been on the back burner for years. You don’t always realize what’s possible until you have the time back.

Free your time, and results will follow.