Impact study / DLA Bid Automation

Echelon Supply & Services + SalesPatriot

Supplier Emails Sent

+3.3×

Per day, automated

Vendor Quotes Received

+2.3×

Per week

Bids Submitted

+1098

Per month

Dollars Bid

+75M

Past 3 months

Customer quote

“

For the first time, we have real visibility into what we're winning, what we're losing, and why. With SalesPatriot we've tripled our bids, streamlined processes and see meaningful growth across the board”

Tim Stone

Head of Government Sales · Echelon Supply & Services

Industry

Industrial & Defense

Company

Echelon · Syracuse, New York

Deployment

3 months

Use case

End-to-End Goverment Bids

The challenge

Transactional volume - processed by hand

Echelon Supply & Services runs a non-stocking, transactional DLA business — high throughput, tight margins, where speed, efficiency and volume are everything.

The team started work at 4am. RFQs were downloaded from DIBBS through ALI, and scanned line by line for known manufacturers, and manually routed to a central coordinator. That coordinator searched CAGE codes in the ERP, drafted individual supplier outreach emails, and pushed hundreds of messages a day — by hand. Vendor responses were forwarded back to the sales team, who reviewed quotes and submitted bids through DIBBS.

Five people. $20M in annual revenue. The process ran — but supplier coverage was incomplete, margin visibility was limited, and the team had no clear picture of what they were missing or why.

Manual RFQ Processing

Government solicitations reviewed and routed by hand every morning, creating a race against the clock before business hours began.

Fragmented Systems

DIBBS, ALI, Outlook, ERP, Excel — no shared workflow, no single source of truth.

Messy Data

Echelon’s ALI ERP instance had over 20,000 supplier records accumulated throughout the years. Many entries inactive, duplicated, invalid, or missing data.

Supplier Discovery Gaps

Identifying the right vendor relied on tribal knowledge. When that knowledge wasn’t in the room, the opportunity was missed.

No Supplier Health or Margin Visibility

No structured way to evaluate which suppliers were performing, which were costing margin, or where better sourcing options existed.

Manual RFQ Processing

Government solicitations reviewed and routed by hand every morning, creating a race against the clock before business hours began.

Fragmented Systems

DIBBS, ALI, Outlook, ERP, Excel — no shared workflow, no single source of truth.

Messy Data

Echelon’s ALI ERP instance had over 20,000 supplier records accumulated throughout the years. Many entries inactive, duplicated, invalid, or missing data.

Supplier Discovery Gaps

Identifying the right vendor relied on tribal knowledge. When that knowledge wasn’t in the room, the opportunity was missed.

No Supplier Health or Margin Visibility

No structured way to evaluate which suppliers were performing, which were costing margin, or where better sourcing options existed.

Deployment

SalesPatriot doesn’t do off the shelf software

SalesPatriot Engineers were on-site at Echelon from day one — mapping handoff and systems before writing a line of code. The platform built for Echelon was built around Echelon's existing ERP, email and workflow.

Week 1

First on-site

SalesPatriot engineers work alongside the sourcing and sales teams to document the full DLA workflow — from 4am RFQ downloads to bid submission — across every system and every handoff

Week 1

First on-site

SalesPatriot engineers work alongside the sourcing and sales teams to document the full DLA workflow — from 4am RFQ downloads to bid submission — across every system and every handoff

Week 2

Data Integration& Clean Up

SalesPatriot engineers connect Echelons ERP, email, and supplier data into a single unified structure — consolidating years of fragmented sourcing history into one accessible and actionable layer. 

Week 2

Data Integration& Clean Up

SalesPatriot engineers connect Echelons ERP, email, and supplier data into a single unified structure — consolidating years of fragmented sourcing history into one accessible and actionable layer. 

Week 3

Automated Sourcing Pipeline

The platform begins automatically analyzing incoming DLA solicitations, identifying relevant manufacturers, and mapping them to known supplier relationships. The manual morning review process is replaced.

Week 3

Automated Sourcing Pipeline

Week 4

AI-Drafted Supplier Outreach

Contract-specific RFQ emails — including FAT requirements, PLT, packaging instructions, and delivery terms — generate automatically. Supplier RFQ emails are sent completely autonomously. Supplier responses are parsed by AI and routed directly into the workflow and assigned to the relevant rep.

Week 4

AI-Drafted Supplier Outreach

Week 5

Full Deployment

The complete bid pipeline is live. The team reviews quotes, evaluates suppliers, and submits bids — without manual data entry, without drafting emails, without cross-system coordination.

Week 5

Full Deployment

The complete bid pipeline is live. The team reviews quotes, evaluates suppliers, and submits bids — without manual data entry, without drafting emails, without cross-system coordination.

Results

The same five people. A fundamentally different operation.

Supplier Emails Sent

+3.3×

Per day

Automated Daily supplier outreach went from hundreds of hand-drafted messages to a fully automated pipeline. The same five people now reach more than three times as many vendors.

Vendor Quotes Received

+2.3×

Per week

More outreach, and better outreach. Supplier contacts mapped automatically and RFQ emails generated with contract-specific requirements—vendors respond faster.

Bids Submitted

+1098

Per week

Per week More vendor quotes translated into more bids. Echelon is now submitting more competitive bids per week than at any point in company history, with the same headcount.

Dollars Bid

+75M

Past 3 Months

Past 3 months The cumulative value of bids submitted over the deployment—an order of magnitude more opportunity in play than before, without adding a single person.

Supplier Emails Sent

+3.3×

Per day

Automated Daily supplier outreach went from hundreds of hand-drafted messages to a fully automated pipeline. The same five people now reach more than three times as many vendors.

Vendor Quotes Received

+2.3×

Per week

More outreach, and better outreach. Supplier contacts mapped automatically and RFQ emails generated with contract-specific requirements—vendors respond faster.

Bids Submitted

+1098

Per week

Per week More vendor quotes translated into more bids. Echelon is now submitting more competitive bids per week than at any point in company history, with the same headcount.

Dollars Bid

+75M

Past 3 Months

Past 3 months The cumulative value of bids submitted over the deployment—an order of magnitude more opportunity in play than before, without adding a single person.

The hidden win

The Compounding Effect

More supplier emails → more vendor quotes → more bids submitted → more revenue captured. SalesPatriot didn’t optimize one step in the chain. It accelerated the entire thing.

The hidden win

The Compounding Effect

More supplier emails → more vendor quotes → more bids submitted → more revenue captured. SalesPatriot didn’t optimize one step in the chain. It accelerated the entire thing.

Voices from the Team

“

"For the first time, we have real visibility into what we're winning, what we're losing, and why. With SalesPatriot we've tripled our bids, streamlined processes and see meaningful growth across the board”

Tim Stone

Head of Government Sales · Echelon Supply & Services

“

"I finally know what my team is working on without having to ask. I can see which bids are moving, which suppliers are slowing us down, and where a rep needs help — in real time. Half my job used to be gathering that information. Now I can actually act on it.”

Joe Redmond

Head of Sales · Echelon Supply & Services

“

"We used to start at 4am just to keep up. Someone had to pull the DIBBS solicitations, scan every line by hand, figure out who to email. Now that's done before anyone walks in the door. We show up and we're already ahead."

Maria Fischer

Sourcing Specialist · Echelon Supply & Services

The bottom line

Echelon didn’t throw bodies at the problem. They built a smarter engine.

Same team. Same headcount. Fundamentally different output. In 3 months, SalesPatriot turned a manual, memory-dependent defense sourcing operation into an automated bid pipeline — and the volume is still climbing.

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The bottom line