MCP: How AI Connects Directly to Your Business Data in Quotation Factory

A new era is here — and it changes everything about how you interact with your quoting software.

At Quotation Factory, we've always believed that your quoting and work preparation software should work for you — not the other way around. That's why we're excited to share something we've been building that fundamentally changes how you can interact with your data: a native MCP server for Quotation Factory.

What Is MCP?

MCP stands for Model Context Protocol. In plain English: it's a standard protocol that allows AI tools — like Claude, ChatGPT, or any self-hosted large language model — to connect directly to real business data and take actions within software systems.

Think of it as giving your AI assistant a live, two-way connection to your Quotation Factory environment. Not just the ability to answer generic questions, but the ability to read your actual project data, summarize it, analyze it, and even act on it — all from within whatever AI environment you already use.

MCP is becoming a universal standard, supported by virtually all major AI providers. That means the investment you make in connecting your systems once will pay off across multiple tools.

The Problem It Solves

Every SaaS platform — including ours — has limitations. There are features users want that take months to build, prioritization decisions that not everyone agrees with, and edge cases that are simply too specific to one company to justify a platform-wide solution.

A good example: our Kanban board view shows individual project values, but it doesn't display the total sales value per status column. If you want to know how much revenue potential is currently sitting in "Requested" status — quotes you still need to send — you'd have to add it up manually.

That kind of insight matters. It tells you where to focus your team's attention and what your short-term revenue pipeline looks like. Building it natively into every view of the platform could take a developer months, and it still might not cover every variation every customer needs.

MCP changes this equation completely.

A Live Demo: AI Meets Quotation Factory

During our recent LinkedIn live stream, we demonstrated exactly what's possible today. Using Claude Desktop with our MCP server connected, we asked a simple question:

"Create an overview of all projects per status and display it in a table, including a deep link per project."

The result? A clean, structured table listing every project, its status, and a clickable link that opens that project directly in Quotation Factory.

Then we went further:

"Make the same overview and include the total sales price per status."

Within seconds, the AI returned a full breakdown: how many projects sit in each status, and the total potential revenue for each. No new feature request. No waiting for a sprint. No development ticket.

This is data that Quotation Factory's Kanban board doesn't currently display — but your AI assistant can surface it right now.

What Else Is Already Possible

Beyond reading and summarizing data, the MCP server already supports:

• Creating new projects from your AI environment
• Uploading CAD files and engineering drawings
• Generating quotes from uploaded technical documents

And we're actively expanding what's available.

The Bigger Vision: Your AI Coworker

Here's where this gets really exciting for metal fabrication companies.

Imagine a coworker that starts working the moment a new quote request lands in your inbox. You give this AI agent access to your email, connect it to Quotation Factory via MCP, and define how it should interpret and act on incoming requests.

That agent could:

1. Read the incoming RFQ from your mailbox
2. Create a new project in Quotation Factory
3. Upload the attached CAD files and drawings
4. Extract part specifications — material, finish, tolerances
5. Derive the powder coat spec from the drawing details and validate it for completeness
6. Flag missing information and draft a reply to the customer

The skills your work preparation team applies every day — interpreting drawings, checking specs, routing jobs — can be codified into an AI workflow that runs automatically, at any hour, on any volume of requests.

We don't need to build every one of these capabilities directly into the Quotation Factory platform. With MCP, you can compose your own workflows using the AI tools and customizations that fit your business best.

What This Means for You as a Quotation Factory User

You stay in control. You choose:

• Which AI environment you want to use (Claude, ChatGPT, a self-hosted model)
• What workflows to build and automate
• How to interpret your data and act on it

And you don't have to wait for us to prioritize every feature request.

Our focus at Quotation Factory remains what it always has been: building the essential, high-value platform features that serve the entire metal fabrication industry. MCP handles the rest — giving you the flexibility to extend and customize in ways that are unique to your operation.

Get Started

If you're a Quotation Factory customer and this sparks ideas, now is the perfect time to explore MCP. Start by looking into tools like Claude Desktop or Claude's Go Work feature, which make it easy to connect MCP servers and build your own AI-powered workflows.

We'll be sharing more live demos and updates as we continue to enrich our MCP server. There's a lot more coming — and we think you'll find it genuinely changes how you work.

Want to stay informed? Follow us on LinkedIn or sign up for our newsletter at quotationfactory.com to get updates as new MCP capabilities roll out.

HiggX — the AI-driven platform for the metal industry that powers this MCP integration — is currently in early access. Visit higgx.app to sign up and be among the first to experience it.