How Field Aerospace speeds up proposal generation for government solicitation with n8n

Context

Field Aerospace is an aircraft modification company with operations in Oklahoma City and Toronto, and a corporate presence in Cincinnati. The team designs, fabricates, installs, tests, and supports certification of aircraft modifications, often for U.S. Department of Defense programs and international customers.

With around 250 employees, Field’s business development and program teams regularly respond to complex government solicitations where speed, accuracy, and consistency directly impact competitiveness.

Operating in a highly regulated and sensitive environment, Field required a solution that could run fully on premises while still enabling non-technical users to benefit from automation. The goal was clear: move faster on proposals without compromising security, auditability, or control.

Challenge

Field Aerospace’s first challenge was the sheer effort required to evaluate and respond to solicitations. Many solicitations exceed 50 pages, and extracting requirements manually can take hours. Drafting a proposal response often required two weeks of work from three to four people, pulling time away from pricing, program execution, and risk assessment.

Opportunity discovery was another major issue. Thousands of government solicitations are published and updated regularly, and Field sometimes learned about relevant opportunities too late. When that happened, teams were forced to rush proposal preparation, increasing risk and reducing response quality.

At the same time, Field was paying for multiple third-party tools that still did not fully meet their needs. They needed a secure, self-hosted system that could reduce manual effort, improve consistency, and help them engage earlier with the right opportunities.

Solution

Field adopted a self-hosted n8n deployment and built an internal web application to make automation accessible to business users. The application, built with React and a Node.js backend, acts as a simple entry point for program managers and business development staff. Users upload solicitation files, trigger workflows via webhooks, receive notifications when processing completes, and review outputs through a clean interface without interacting directly with workflows.

For proposal creation, n8n orchestrates a set of workflows that break each solicitation into structured sections, extract key prompts and requirement language, and generate draft responses. The system combines solicitation content with an internal library of approved reference material, including past performance examples, so outputs reflect Field’s real capabilities rather than generic AI text. Drafts are returned in Markdown, clearly marked as AI-generated starting points, and exported into Microsoft Teams for review and refinement.

For requirements extraction, Field built a workflow that processes long solicitation documents and produces a consolidated requirements matrix. Instead of manually searching for shall, must, and will statements, teams receive a structured output they can validate and reuse downstream.

To improve opportunity discovery, Field implemented an automated evaluator workflow on n8n that connects to Deltek GovWin via API. Each day, n8n retrieves newly created or updated solicitations, scores them against Field’s internal criteria, and delivers a filtered report to business development and leadership. By surfacing only high-fit opportunities, the team can focus attention where it matters most.

Field has also begun building an internal AI chatbot connected to company data, orchestrated by n8n, allowing employees to ask questions without exposing sensitive context to external tools.

Results

Field replaced two legacy tools and eliminated approximately $30,000 in annual software costs. More importantly, the new workflows dramatically reduced the time burden on a small, highly utilized team. A proposal draft that previously required about two weeks of work from multiple contributors can now reach an 80% starting point in roughly 25 minutes, allowing teams to focus on pricing, evaluation, and risk reduction.

Requirements extraction improved as well. What once took hours of manual effort is now produced in 15 to 20 minutes, depending on document size, with outputs that are easier to validate and reuse.

Operationally, the opportunity evaluator has reduced the risk of missed solicitations and last-minute proposal scrambles. By identifying relevant opportunities earlier and accelerating proposal preparation, Field reports more consistent response quality and a stronger competitive position. The team expects these improvements to support higher win rates over time, while continuing to expand n8n into additional internal processes and data sources.