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January 8, 2025 · The Bloomfield Team

Your Quoting Process Is Costing You Money

A $12 million job shop quotes roughly 50 RFQs per month. Their estimator, a 22-year veteran, builds each quote from scratch using a combination of ERP lookups, material supplier calls, and experience. He is accurate about 80% of the time. On the 20% where the quote misses, the shop either loses the bid by pricing too high or wins the job and watches margin evaporate because the estimate was too low.

That 20% miss rate, applied across 50 monthly RFQs at an average job value of $18,000, represents roughly $180,000 per month in either lost revenue or margin erosion. Over a year, the number is $2.16 million. The estimator is doing excellent work given the tools available. The process around him is the problem.

The Three Ways Quoting Loses Money

Speed. The average job shop takes three to five days to return a quote. Buyers who send RFQs to multiple shops simultaneously tend to shortlist the first two or three responses that arrive. Every day past the second day drops the probability of winning the bid by roughly 15%. A five-day turnaround means the quote is likely arriving after the buyer has already narrowed the field. The work was done. The opportunity was already gone.

Accuracy. Quoting errors come from incomplete information, typically from missing historical context on similar past jobs. When an estimator cannot quickly find what the shop charged for a comparable part two years ago, what the actual cycle times turned out to be, or whether a specific material required special handling, they estimate from general knowledge. General knowledge adds a safety margin when the estimator is uncertain. That safety margin is the difference between a competitive price and a losing one.

Consistency. Most shops with multiple estimators see meaningful variance in how the same RFQ gets priced by different people. One estimator builds conservative quotes with wide margins. Another prices aggressively to win volume. Without a structured process that draws on the same historical data and applies the same margin rules, the shop's pricing strategy depends entirely on which estimator opens the email first.

Where the Process Breaks

The quoting workflow in most job shops follows a predictable sequence that introduces delay at every handoff.

An RFQ arrives via email. Someone forwards it to the estimator, sometimes the same day, sometimes the next morning. The estimator reviews the drawing and identifies material, tolerances, operations, and secondary processes. This assessment takes 15 to 30 minutes and is where the estimator's experience adds the most value.

Then the research phase begins. The estimator searches the ERP for past jobs with similar geometry or material. The search is manual, often relying on part description fields that were inconsistently filled out over the years. Finding a good comparable can take an hour. Sometimes no comparable exists in the system, even though the shop ran a similar job eighteen months ago under a different customer's part number.

Material pricing requires contacting a supplier or checking a spreadsheet that may be weeks out of date. Machine availability requires a conversation with the shop foreman or a check against a scheduling board. If the job requires outside processing like heat treatment or plating, the estimator needs a sub-quote from a vendor, which adds another one to three days to the cycle.

For a comprehensive look at how AI changes this workflow, see our guide to AI-powered quoting in manufacturing.

The Information Problem

Every delay in the quoting process traces back to the same root cause. The information the estimator needs exists somewhere inside the operation, and the system does not deliver it to them when they need it.

The ERP has job history but no efficient way to search by geometry or tolerance profile. The spreadsheets have material costs but they live on one person's machine. The quality records have data about which processes caused problems on similar parts, but those records sit in a different system. The machinist who ran the most comparable job remembers the setup challenges, but nobody thought to document them in a searchable format.

The estimator is the person who bridges all these gaps through sheer effort and institutional memory. That makes them the most valuable and most bottlenecked person in the front office.

What a Better Process Looks Like

The estimator's judgment is the valuable part of quoting. Everything else, the searching, the cross-referencing, the price lookups, the historical comparisons, is information retrieval that a properly built system handles in seconds.

When an RFQ arrives, the system identifies the customer, pulls their order history and typical margin expectations, and surfaces the three to five most similar past jobs based on geometry, material, tolerance band, and operations. Each comparable shows what was quoted, what was actually spent, and what the margin turned out to be. Current material pricing from the most recent supplier transactions is already attached.

The estimator reviews this package, applies their judgment on pricing strategy, capacity constraints, and customer relationship factors, and builds a quote in 60 to 90 minutes that would previously have taken two to three days. The quote is more accurate because it is built on complete historical data rather than partial recall. It arrives faster because the research phase was eliminated.

Building this kind of system requires connecting your ERP, quoting records, and supplier data into a single layer that understands manufacturing context. The technology to do this exists today. The shops that build it first will quote faster, more accurately, and with better margin control than everyone else in their market.

The Cost of Waiting

Every month that passes with the current process in place is another month of bids lost to faster competitors, margins compressed by incomplete data, and estimator time consumed by work that a system should handle. The $2 million annual impact at a mid-size shop is a conservative estimate. For shops with high-mix, low-volume work where every quote is different, the number is higher.

The estimators know this. Ask them. They will tell you exactly where the process slows down, what information they wish they had at their fingertips, and which jobs they know they mispriced because they did not have time to do the research properly. The fix starts with listening to them.