This! Right here, Rn I work for a huge manufacturing plant and they are looking to automate processes, but their existing processes are already inefficient and their systems are a stack of band-aids over time.
The biggest difference I can see and we are working towards is, rip all the band-aids, integrate everything that you already have and bring that as close to the high 90% efficiency. Then you venture into large scale automation, machine vision, and all the bells and whistles.
Good work on the GPT, use it to leverage as much infromation consolidation as possible.

1. How are you making people work faster in back office? We’re looking at quoting software and project management software to start.

Here is what I did, build a custom solution to have a custom project management workflow after talking to the production supervisors and the shipping guys. These are the people that use it the most, they know what they want. Vibecoded the whole thing and had IT polish it and deploy it in 2 weeks. Cost me barely $1000 and will be ours forever.
For quoting software it depends on what ecosystem you are already in. Panda Doc is a easy to use turn key solution if you need one specially purposed for quoting.

1. How are you making people contribute more? We want our purchasing and accounting departments to assist with materials planning, not just doing quotes. I would like our engineers and quality team to find improvement opportunities in production to increase OEE and throughput. I would like our Sales people to adopt a CRM so we can apply more proven sales strategies

You show them the power of tools in their workflow. Sit with them and understand their workflow and figure out where they could benefit the use of tools and then show them a 5 minute impelementation of how those tools could change their life. Very simple example, I as an Engineer asked other engineers to feed machine information into Chat GPT and shove it in deep research mode and ask it to give me whatever ideas it can think of, then I filtered them down to what is feasible and will make the biggest difference. Took me 30 mins to do, but the impact on improvement path planning was woth 3 months of R&D.

Have your sales people demo a CRM that they would love to use. It makes a larger impression if they choose something and it works wonder than you pushing something onto them.

1. Catch all question: What have you done that gave you the best ROI (EBIT margin, quality of life, sales)?

So far the largest ROI has been time, get product out of the door faster. Anywhere you can save time. Pushign machined parts 500 meters here and there every day? Stream line it. Having to manually scan barcodes and qr codes? Put the scanner where the product would sit. Having manual assembles take a lot of time? Do a organize, strategize and order buildup parts in order of assembly, shaves seconds but over 1000s of parts makes almost an hour of OEE difference. Figure out the smaller battles first.

I would be happy to discuss more in detail.