When a client sends over a bill of materials straight out of their 3D design model, most estimators know what’s coming: a spreadsheet with thousands of lines, riddled with duplicates, dumped in whatever order the software felt like. Turning that into something a vendor can actually price is a slog — pivot tables, copy-paste, renaming, formulas, and hours you don’t have when the bid is due.
For the estimating team at Process Service Specialists (PSS), an industrial piping contractor, that used to be a two-to-three day job. On a recent bid, it took about an hour and a half.
The situation: a 7,000-line model dump, no detailed drawings, and a deadline
PSS was bidding a project where the detailed drawings were still two months out — but the client wanted to move. What they had instead was a model dump from their 3D design software: a bill of materials roughly 6,000–7,000 line items long, exported by system with heavy duplication. Every “like” item was scattered across the file.
The task was to turn that raw dump into a clean, consolidated, priced BOM the team could send straight to vendors.
What PSS did with the Boon Agent
Rather than open Excel and start building pivot tables, the estimator handed the whole file to the Boon Agent and worked it in steps:
- Consolidate. “Combine all like items as one line item.” ~7,000 lines collapsed down to roughly 500 unique lines.
- Sort by material grade. Group the consolidated items by grade — stainless, PVC, copper — the way vendors actually want to price them.
- Price it out. Calculate a total for each line: unit rate × quantity, in the exact format PSS sends to its vendors.
The output was a vendor-ready BOM in the format PSS uses every day — no exporting to a second Excel template, no reformatting.
The estimator’s own read on it: taking it step by step, rather than trying to do everything in one prompt, was the unlock. “It may take four steps to get to your end product… start to consolidate.” The first pass, still learning the tool, ran about an hour and a half. A job that normally eats two to three days.
The before-and-after
Before Boon, the same result meant running a pivot table, copying it into another sheet, writing concatenate formulas to get the line items right, then moving it all into the PSS template — two to three days of it.
With the Boon Agent, that whole chain became three plain-English steps and about ninety minutes — on the very first attempt, while still learning how to prompt it.
Why it matters beyond one bid
This isn’t a one-off. PSS runs 20–30 projects a month, and a meaningful share of them start from a client-provided BOM — and even when they don’t, the team now applies the same consolidate-sort-price pattern to standardize every bid into the same vendor-ready format. What used to be the slowest, most manual step in the estimate has become one of the fastest.
It also sits on top of a workflow PSS has been running on Boon since the start of the year — takeoffs, extractions, and estimating across a steady book of industrial piping projects.
The bigger number
Cody runs 20–30 projects a month, and this BOM consolidation shows up on roughly 20–30% of them. Applied across a year at the conservative end — 20 projects a month, one in five needing this work, a two-day manual baseline — that is about 48 of these jobs a year, and more than 700 estimator-hours reclaimed: roughly 17 work-weeks of an estimator’s time given back. At the top of Cody’s own stated range it approaches a full estimator-year. One workflow, one contractor.
In the estimator’s words
“It’s been my best friend for the last couple of days.”
Cody Guidry, Estimator, Process Service Specialists
“That BOM would have probably taken me two days to get it right, to be able to send it out. On and off, it probably took me an hour, an hour and a half — and that was the first one, while I was still learning it.”
Cody Guidry, Estimator, Process Service Specialists
“Now I’m consistently sending out the same formatted Excel sheet to our vendors.”
Cody Guidry, Estimator, Process Service Specialists
Acknowledgements
Built from a working session with the PSS estimating team on 2026-07-28. Thanks to Cody Guidry and Colby Waters at Process Service Specialists, and to Arjun Saharan, Rafael Cisneros, and Deepti Yenireddy on the Boon side.
