Monday morning: fourteen RFQs, one estimator
The inbox has a bundle from a regular customer with nine drawings, two enquiries from new buyers who found you online and a chaser for a quote you promised last Wednesday. Each one needs the drawing opened, the material and stock size worked out, the operations planned in your head, a cycle time guessed, setups counted, finishing and inspection added, and a price for three quantity breaks.
The estimator is also the person the shop floor asks about fixturing, and the one who answers the phone when a customer wants to know where their parts are. Quotes get done in the gaps, which means late in the day and in batches.
Why the queue never clears
It is rarely that pricing is slow. It is that nothing is reused. The shop has probably machined something very close to half of these parts before, but the old quote is in a sent folder, the actual cycle time is on a job card in a box file, and the program is on the machine controller.
- RFQs arrive as email attachments in mixed formats: PDF drawings, STEP models, spreadsheets of part numbers.
- There is no single list of open RFQs with due dates, so priority goes to whoever chases.
- Past quotes and past jobs are not searchable by material, size or feature.
- Material prices are checked by phone or email with the stockholder each time.
- Outside processing such as anodising or heat treatment is priced from memory.
What a slow quote costs a subcontract shop
Buyers often send the same package to several machine shops and place the work with whoever comes back first at a sensible price. A quote that goes out after the order has been placed elsewhere is time spent for nothing. The quieter cost is that rushed quotes miss things: a second setup, a tight tolerance bore that needs honing, a thread that needs a gauge you do not own. Those mistakes show up months later as jobs that lose money on the machine.
The RFQ intake and quote drafting we build
- A shared RFQ mailbox is read automatically. Each enquiry becomes one record with the customer, the requested quantities, the due date for the quote and every attached file.
- Drawings are read with an AI extraction step that pulls out part number, revision, material, finish, general tolerances and any notes about certification or inspection. The estimator sees these next to the drawing and corrects anything wrong.
- Where a STEP model is supplied, its bounding box gives the stock size, and the material is priced from your latest stockholder prices held in one table.
- The tool searches your past quotes and completed jobs for parts of similar material, size and features, and shows what you quoted, what the job actually took and whether it made money.
- A draft quote is built from your own hourly rates per machine, setup times, material, outside processing and inspection, at each quantity break.
- The estimator adjusts the cycle times and operations, then sends the quote as your branded PDF. The RFQ record is updated and a follow up date is set.
| Pulled from the RFQ | Used for |
|---|---|
| Material and stock size | Material cost at current prices |
| Quantities requested | Price breaks and setup spread |
| Finish and treatment notes | Outside processing lines |
| Inspection and certification notes | Inspection time and paperwork |
| Similar past parts | A starting point for cycle times |
Nothing is priced automatically and sent. The tool drafts; the estimator decides.
How the quoting week changes
Open RFQs sit on one list with the date each is due, so the one from the regular customer does not vanish under the new enquiries. The estimator starts each quote from a draft that already has the material, the finish and a reference to the nearest part you have made, which means less time on arithmetic and more on the operations that actually decide the price.
A second person can prepare drafts for the estimator to check, which matters when the estimator is on holiday or stuck on the shop floor.
Signs your quoting has become the bottleneck
- Buyers ring to ask if their quote is coming.
- Only one person in the business can price a drawing.
- You have quoted the same part twice at different prices.
- Quotes are usually written after the shop has gone home.
- You cannot say how many RFQs you received last month or how many you won.