Event-Driven Bid Intake and Ops Dashboard for Always Tile & Stone

Project Overview

Always Tile & Stone receives a high volume of bid invitations across multiple platforms, most arriving through Gmail. Their estimating team was manually reading and sorting emails, creating tracking spreadsheets, organizing Drive folders, and downloading bid documents from third-party portals. That admin work was stealing time from the activities that actually win bids: reviewing scope, pricing, and responding quickly. We built an event-driven automation system that turned their messy bid inbox into a reliable, repeatable pipeline.

Why Event-Driven Automation

The bid intake problem couldn't be solved with a simple cron job or scheduled script. Bid invitations arrive at unpredictable times, from multiple platforms, in varying formats. An event-driven approach (triggering processing the moment an email lands) ensured no invitation sat unprocessed while estimators focused on other work. This architecture also made the system naturally extensible: adding a new bid platform meant adding a new parser, not redesigning the pipeline.

Solving the Protected Portal Problem

Many bid platforms like BuildingConnected, SmartBid, and Procore require authentication and don't expose clean download APIs. We used Puppeteer-based browser automation to log into these portals, navigate authenticated pages, and download project documents automatically. Session state was stored securely so downloads could run without requiring manual login each time, a critical detail for reliability when processing dozens of bids per day.

Status-Driven Workflows

The client needed operational workflows tied to record status: when a bid moves from "new" to "in-review," the right folder gets moved, the assigned estimator gets notified, and the tracking sheet updates. We defined the state machine first, mapping what each status means and exactly what should happen on each transition, then implemented flows incrementally. This kept behavior predictable and easy to validate, avoiding the kind of subtle bugs where a status change silently skips a step.

From Automation to Ops Dashboard

As the automation proved reliable, the team needed a way to review, manage, and correct records when edge cases arose. We built an internal dashboard using Next.js and NestJS that gives the estimating and ops team full visibility into the bid pipeline (incoming bids, processing status, file organization, and assignment history), all in one place. This transformed bid intake from a daily fire drill into a system that runs predictably, with human oversight applied where it matters most.

Client Objectives

The engagement was guided by clear objectives that defined success for business leadership and delivery teams.

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Automate Bid Intake End-to-End

Build an event-driven system that monitors incoming email, detects bid-related messages, and processes them without manual intervention.

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Standardize File Organization

Automatically create project folders in Google Drive with consistent naming conventions and upload all bid attachments.

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Provide Operational Visibility

Deliver a dashboard for internal staff to review, manage, and correct records, turning bid intake from a daily fire drill into a predictable system.