Question 1

What is Grapho?

Accepted Answer

Grapho is the Explainable AI (XAI) platform developed by Intellico for Tender/Bid Management and Design-by-Reuse, designed for technical and sales teams and design departments within companies operating on a make-to-order or engineer-to-order basis.

Grapho analyses tender documents and automatically extracts the technical requirements; it retrieves similar projects that have already been completed, such as CAD profiles, by applying the principle of design-by-reuse; and it builds a corporate knowledge base that can be consulted using the history of tenders, projects, bills of materials and technical drawings.

Question 2

How does Grapho analyse complex tender documents?

Accepted Answer

Grapho automatically analyses tender documents, extracts all the technical requirements contained therein and drafts a proposal in line with the company's templates. The AI identifies critical issues, inconsistencies and potential incompatibilities hidden within the document, reducing the risk of unidentified requirements that could lead to costly errors in bids.

The process consists of four stages:

Learns: reads and understands the tender;
Analyses: extracts and evaluates the requirements;
Suggests: consults similar projects and recommends the best solutions;
Generates: creates the proposal and the detailed checklist.

On this basis, the team can quickly assess whether to proceed (Go) or not (No Go) with the opportunity. In the case of Fedegari (pharmaceutical sector, Engineer-to-Order model), where each tender requires the analysis of URS documents running to hundreds of pages, Grapho has reduced the time taken to process tender documents by 60-70%.

Question 3

Which tender documents does Grapho analyse (RFPs, technical specifications, URS)?

Accepted Answer

Grapho analyses the typical documents involved in tendering processes within the industrial contract manufacturing sector:

complex and unstructured tender notices and documents;
RFPs (Requests for Proposal) and client requests;
technical specifications;
URS (User Requirement Specifications), some of which run to hundreds of pages.

Grapho enables the extraction and processing of information to support Process Engineers, Quality Assurance teams and After-Sales Services in managing customer requirements, from the quotation and design phases through to implementation.

Question 4

What are the benefits of Grapho when preparing technical proposals?

Accepted Answer

In complex industrial contexts, such as bespoke engineering systems or solutions, preparing a technical proposal can take weeks or months and involve multiple business functions.

Grapho takes action on three fronts:

Reducing time to bid: it speeds up the proposal preparation cycle by eliminating repetitive manual tasks and reducing internal iterations. It also helps to increase the success rate by reducing the time spent on low-potential opportunities.
Quality and reliability of the response: AI identifies and structures requirements, constraints and evaluation criteria, reducing errors, omissions and inconsistencies. Thanks to Explainable AI, the user can navigate, validate and understand each suggestion, whilst retaining control over the content.
Identifying opportunities: the Scouting module sends automatic alerts and notifications about new business opportunities.

The result is faster, more accurate and more consistent proposals, with a lower risk of errors and reduced reliance on individual staff members.

Question 5

What does design-by-reuse mean and how does it speed up design work?

Accepted Answer

Design-by-reuse means reusing existing technical designs rather than designing from scratch every time.

In Grapho, this principle is applied through Design Similarity Analysis: the system compares a new design with the portfolio of existing technical drawings and identifies designs that are similar in terms of geometry, dimensions, materials and application, also analysing the information available in the company's systems.

Instead of starting from scratch, the technical department builds on components and solutions that have already been validated, reducing response times, errors and the loss of know-how associated with staff turnover. In practice, a designer working on a new specification can query Grapho and search the company's entire design archive in a matter of seconds, rather than relying on memory or manually sifting through folders accumulated over the years.

Question 6

Which industries and companies use Grapho's design-by-reuse?

Accepted Answer

Grapho is used by companies that design and manufacture bespoke products or systems, in Engineer-to-Order (ETO) and Make-to-Order (MTO) models: plant engineering, machinery, industrial moulds and dies, mechanical components and tools, and bespoke engineering solutions.

A concrete example is Phoenix International, one of the leading international players in aluminium extrusion dies: with over 50 years' experience, 10 production plants and one of the most extensive design archives in the sector. Having demonstrated its value across the group's core activities, the company is now extending the use of Grapho Design to its international subsidiaries.

The benefits extend beyond the design office: this reusability translates into faster quotations for new projects, including production sequences and preliminary cost estimates, and the streamlining of the bill of materials, with fewer variants, duplicates and non-standard items.

Question 7

Is Grapho only for tender management?

Accepted Answer

No. Tenders and technical proposals are the most obvious application, but Grapho is useful in all business processes where it is necessary to cross-reference and quickly consult company documents.

The mechanism is always the same: Grapho accesses the history of quotations, projects, bills of materials, CAD technical drawings and tender results, and builds a constantly updated and contextualised corporate knowledge base, where information can be accessed instantly even within complex organisations with distributed teams.

This is why Grapho is used by four different departments working on the same document repository:

sales teams, who prepare responses to customers by combining technical and commercial aspects;
engineering teams, who rework enquiries by reusing past solutions;
process engineers and quality assurance, who verify consistency between the enquiry, the quotation and the implementation;
customer care and technical support, who respond to customers on technical and commercial aspects of products and systems.

Question 8

How can customer care and technical support use Grapho?

Accepted Answer

Customer care and technical support are among the teams that use Grapho: they respond to customers' enquiries regarding technical and commercial aspects of products and systems by drawing on the same knowledge base created for quotations, where past quotations are centralised and decisions remain traceable and accessible.

In this context, Grapho can support:

customer enquiries under warranty;
the management of maintenance contracts;
access to price lists, item lists and spare parts lists;
retrieving the original quotation or project, to ensure responses are consistent with what has already been provided to the customer.

The reuse of projects also enables faster identification of spare parts, improving responsiveness in the aftermarket.

Question 9

Which company documents can Grapho cross-reference besides tender documents?

Accepted Answer

In addition to tender documents, Grapho works on the body of documentation that the company has already produced:

completed tenders and projects;
bills of materials;
CAD technical drawings;
technical manuals;
tender results.

On this basis, it builds a corporate knowledge base that is constantly updated and contextualised, in which every decision is traceable and justified. The digitisation of knowledge reduces reliance on individual staff members and increases the scalability of the MTO/ETO business, enabling immediate access to information even within complex organisations and across distributed teams.

Streamline tender and RFP management and generate technical bids with AI

With Grapho, forget about:

LONG RESPONSE TIMES

WASTE

ERRORS

GRAPHO: Explainable AI

Transforms the Tender Process

Areas of application

Who does Grapho choose?

Sales teams

Engineering teams

Process Engineer & Quality Assurance

Customer care and technical support

Case Studies

How Phoenix International Uses AI to Unlock Decades of Engineering Know-How

How Fedegari Accelerates Tender Response in Pharmaceutical Manufacturing with AI

AI Applications for Industry and New Product Development: Intellico’s Experience at SMAU London 2025

Generative AI in Design: A Paradigm Shift for the Design Industry

Cut time-to-market: a case study on tender management in the manufacturing sector

Graph Neural Networks Applied to Similarity Search of Extrusion Die – a technical overview

Explainable AI for Manufacturing and R&D: AI Regio Project

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