How to reduce quotation time for drawing-based enquiries

An enquiry arrives on Monday: a customer email, three PDF drawings, a specification reference and a quantity. By Thursday it still has not been answered. Nobody ignored it. The one person who can cost it properly spent the week on the shop floor, at an inspection and on a rejected lot.

If you make castings, forgings, machined parts or fabrications to customer drawings, you know this pattern. You want to reduce quotation time, but when you look at the work, very little of it is writing the quotation. Most of it happens before anyone opens the template.

This article is about that work: where it goes, how to measure it on your own enquiries, and which fixes are worth trying before you buy anything.

Where does the time go when you prepare a quotation from a drawing?

Ask an estimator what takes long and the answer is usually "costing". Costing is the part that needs experience, but it is often not where most of the hours sit. Follow one enquiry from the inbox to the sent quote and the time tends to split like this.

Reading the enquiry. The material grade, quantity, delivery, testing and packing requirements are spread across the email body, the drawing title block, the drawing notes and a specification the customer only names. Someone has to read all of it and write down what is actually being asked.

Clarifying. A grade is written in the customer's own terms, a tolerance is missing, the drawing revision in the email does not match the attachment, or it is unclear whether machining is included. Each question is an email and a wait, and the enquiry goes back to the bottom of the pile.

Working out weight and route. For a casting or forging, someone estimates the finished and rough weight from the drawing, then decides the process route: pattern or die, heat treatment, machining, outside testing.

Looking things up. Current raw material rates, the machine-hour rate, the last price for a similar part, the rates from the heat treater and the testing lab. This information usually lives in different spreadsheets, old quotations and people's memory.

Writing and formatting. Putting it into the house format with the right terms, validity, taxes and delivery.

Revising. The customer asks for a different quantity, material or delivery, and part of the work is done again.

Notice that only one of these steps, costing the route, truly needs the estimator's judgement. The rest is reading, chasing and looking up, done by the same person because nobody else knows where things are.

How long should a quotation take? Measure your own enquiry to quotation time

There is no correct number for every business. A repeat part with a known price should take minutes. A new casting with testing requirements may reasonably take days, because some of that time is waiting for the customer or a sub-supplier. What matters is your own number, and your records already hold most of it.

Take your last 30 enquiries and note, for each:

1. Date received and date the quotation was sent. The gap is your enquiry to quotation time.
2. Clarification rounds. How many times you had to go back to the customer before you could quote.
3. Who prepared it. If one name appears on most of them, that person is your bottleneck.
4. Revisions. How many times the quotation was reissued.
5. Outcome. Won, lost, or no reply, and whether any were lost because the quote went late.

Then time three or four quotations as they are prepared. Keep a simple log of start and stop times against each step above: reading, clarifying, weight and route, looking up, writing, revising. An estimate made afterwards will not tell you much; the log will.

The arithmetic is simple enough to check yourself. For example, if you receive 40 drawing-based enquiries a month and each takes 90 minutes of hands-on work across these steps, that is 60 hours a month, more than a full working week, usually taken from your most experienced person. If half of that time is reading, chasing and looking up, 30 of those hours do not need that person's judgement at all.

Your figures may be much smaller or much larger. The point of measuring is to know which steps hold the hours before you choose a fix.

How to reduce quotation time without new software

Several of the slowest hours come from how enquiries are received and filed, not from the quotation itself. Try these first.

• Keep an enquiry register. One sheet: date received, customer, part, who owns it, status, date quoted. Enquiries stop getting lost in inboxes, and you get the measurement above for free.
• Send a standard enquiry checklist. Material grade and standard, quantity and annual volume, drawing revision, machining scope, testing and inspection, packing and delivery. Sending it with your first reply cuts down on clarification rounds.
• Keep one rate sheet, updated on a fixed day. Raw material, machine hours, heat treatment, testing and freight in one place, with the date of the last update. Stale rates are how old prices end up in new quotations.
• Make past quotations findable. File each one by part type, material and weight range, so a similar part is found in a minute instead of rebuilt.
• Separate preparation from pricing. A junior person can read the enquiry, fill the checklist, find similar past quotes and prepare the weight and route sheet. The estimator then prices the job instead of doing all of it.
• Decide what not to quote. Some enquiries are outside your capability or your price range. Declining them quickly is also faster quoting.

If you quote a handful of new parts a month, these habits may be all you need.

When is costing or quoting software enough?

Dedicated costing and quoting tools exist, including some built for casting, forging and machining. They are designed to calculate cost once the part is described in structured form: material, weight, process and machining features.

They are a good fit when your enquiries already arrive structured, for example as 3D models or on the customer's standard forms, and when the slow step is the calculation itself. They help much less when the hours sit before the calculation: reading scanned drawings, working out what the customer actually wants, and chasing missing information. Most of that work stays with a person.

So before buying one, check your time log. If costing is the slow step, a costing tool may be the right answer. If reading and clarifying are, it will not remove those hours.

When is AI the wrong tool for quotations?

AI is not the answer for every quoting problem. Be sceptical if:

• Volume is low. A few enquiries a month rarely justify more than a register, a checklist and a rate sheet.
• Most of your work is repeat parts. If you quote the same parts again and again, a price list and a past-quote lookup will do more than any reading system.
• The bottleneck is the pricing decision. If the delay is the owner deciding what margin to take on a strategic customer, that is judgement, and it should stay with the owner.
• Your rates are not written down. No system can apply rates that only exist in one person's head. Writing them down comes first. We wrote about this order of work in Don't start with AI. Start with the problem.

What does a working quotation system look like?

Where volume is real and the hours are in reading and looking up, a well-built system prepares the quotation and leaves the pricing judgement to a person. In practice it should:

• Read the enquiry and the drawings, including scans, and pull out the part number, drawing revision, material, quantity, key dimensions, tolerances, testing and delivery as named fields.
• Keep the source. Every extracted value points back to the page or email it came from, so the estimator can check it in seconds.
• Flag what is missing. An unreadable note, a grade it does not recognise, a revision mismatch: these go to a person, with a draft clarification email, instead of being guessed.
• Find similar past quotations by material, process and weight, so the estimator starts from what was quoted before.
• Apply the current rates from the rate sheet, never from an old document.
• Draft the quotation in your house format, with your standard terms, ready for review.

The estimator still decides the route, the price and the margin. The difference is that they review a prepared draft instead of building it from an inbox. Our Quotation Maker implementation example shows part of this approach: turning scattered product, pricing and specification information into a consistent draft quotation.

What should you ask before buying anything?

Whether it is software, a service or a custom build, ask:

1. How many hours does a quotation take us today, measured, and which steps will this remove?
2. Does it read the scanned drawings and email threads we actually receive, or only clean CAD files?
3. What happens when it is unsure of a value? Does it guess, or does it flag?
4. Can every value in the draft be traced back to the original document?
5. Where do the rates come from, and who keeps them current?
6. What does our estimator still decide, and is that the part that needs their judgement?
7. If our volume is low, will you tell us this is not worth doing?

If the answer to the last question is anything but yes, keep looking.

Where to start

Take your last 30 enquiries and write down the date received and the date quoted. That single gap, and who sat in the middle of it, will tell you whether you need a register and a checklist, a costing tool, or something that reads enquiries for you.

If you would like a second opinion on the numbers, book a 30-minute call about this one process at prakreon.com/contact. We will ask who prepares your quotations, how many you send and how long they take, and we will tell you plainly if AI is not the answer.