· The Bloomfield Team
How to Audit Your Shop's Quoting Process in One Week
Most manufacturers know their quoting process is slower than it should be. Few know exactly where the hours go. An RFQ arrives on Monday and a quote ships on Thursday, but the four days between those two events contain dead time, rework, and information searches that nobody has mapped.
This is a five-day audit framework. It requires no new software, no consultants, and no disruption to your current workflow. One person with a notebook and access to your ERP can run it. By Friday, you will have a clear picture of where your quoting process breaks down and what it costs.
Day 1: Map the Current Flow
Sit with your lead estimator for one full quoting cycle. From the moment an RFQ hits the inbox to the moment the quote leaves. Write down every step, every system touched, every person consulted.
You are looking for the handoffs. RFQ received by sales, forwarded to estimating, drawing reviewed, questions sent back to customer, material pricing requested from purchasing, machine time estimated, secondary ops added, management review, quote sent. Each handoff is a potential delay point. Each one has a wait time attached to it that nobody currently measures.
Most shops discover between 8 and 14 discrete steps in their quoting process. The estimator's actual work, calculating cycle times, selecting operations, building the price, usually accounts for 20 to 30% of the total elapsed time. The other 70 to 80% is waiting: waiting for information, waiting for approvals, waiting for responses.
For a broader perspective on how quoting fits into your overall operation, see our complete guide to AI-powered quoting in manufacturing.
Day 2: Time the Information Searches
Track every instance where the estimator leaves the quoting workflow to find information. Record what they searched for, where they found it, and how long the search took.
Common searches include: historical pricing on similar jobs, current material costs, machine availability, customer-specific requirements, tolerance notes from past quality issues, and supplier lead times for outside processes like heat treatment or plating.
The data from Day 2 usually produces the single most revealing number in the audit: the percentage of quoting time spent on information retrieval versus actual estimating work. When shops see that their best estimator spends only a fifth of their time actually estimating, the scope of the problem becomes concrete.
Day 3: Pull Win Rate and Turnaround Data
Go into your ERP or CRM and pull the last 100 quotes. For each, record: date RFQ received, date quote sent, whether the job was won or lost, and the quoted dollar value.
Calculate your average turnaround time and your win rate. Then split the data into two groups: quotes that shipped in under 48 hours and quotes that took longer. Compare the win rates between the two groups. The gap is your speed premium, measured in real dollars.
If your system does not track quote dates reliably, sample what you can. Even 30 or 40 data points will show the pattern. The correlation between speed and win rate is consistent enough across industries that partial data still tells the story.
Day 4: Interview Three People
Talk to your lead estimator, your sales lead, and one production supervisor. Ask each of them the same three questions.
What is the single biggest delay in getting a quote out the door? What information do you wish you had faster? If you could change one thing about how we quote, what would it be?
Record their answers verbatim. The patterns will be obvious. In most shops, all three people identify the same two or three bottlenecks from different vantage points. The estimator sees the information search. The sales lead sees the turnaround time. The production supervisor sees the disconnect between quoted hours and actual hours.
Day 5: Calculate the Cost
Take the data from Days 1 through 4 and build a simple cost model.
Estimator labor cost per quote: hours spent times fully loaded hourly rate. Multiply by quotes per month. That is your direct quoting cost. Now calculate the revenue gap: your current win rate versus the win rate you would achieve at a two-day turnaround, multiplied by your average job value and monthly quote volume. The difference is the revenue you are leaving on the table.
By end of day Friday, you will have five deliverables: a process map, a time allocation breakdown, a win rate analysis by speed, qualitative bottleneck data from three perspectives, and a dollar figure attached to the problem. That is enough to make a decision about what to fix first and how much to invest in fixing it.
What Comes After the Audit
The audit reveals where the time goes. Fixing it requires making the right information available at the right moment, connecting your ERP data, your job history, your material pricing, and your team's operational knowledge into a workflow that serves the estimator instead of requiring them to hunt through six systems.
The five-day audit costs you one person's time for a week. The quoting problems it reveals cost you every month they go unsolved.
Related Field Notes
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