How to quote parts as a Machine Shop

For most machine shops, quoting is a necessary evil that eats up time and resources. It’s frustrating when you spend hours on a quote only to lose the job anyway. But here’s the thing — your quoting process can actually be a powerful tool for improving your shop’s efficiency and profitability.

At Phasio, we’ve worked with numerous machine shops facing this exact problem. We’ve seen firsthand how the ability to generate accurate quotes quickly can significantly impact the bottom line. Some technologies, especially in molding, can take up to 12 hours to produce a single quote. That’s simply not sustainable in today’s fast-paced manufacturing environment.

This article isn’t about theoretical solutions or complex systems that require a complete overhaul of your operations. Instead, we’re going to walk through some practical, low-cost strategies that you can implement right away to streamline your quoting process. We’ll cover:

1. A simple technique for rapid initial estimates
2. Methods for scaling this approach as your business grows
3. An introduction to algorithmic quoting and its potential benefits

Our goal is to help you turn quoting from a time sink into a competitive advantage. By the end of this article, you’ll have concrete steps you can take to make your quoting process more efficient and effective.

This strategy can be implemented and tested at no cost, all you have to do is provide a ‘sense check’ estimate.

‘Sense check’ estimates

When a customer first reaches out to you, they’ll often provide some cursory details, some information about the use-case, maybe a CAD file, etc.

This information can be useful, but it is not the foundation upon which a quote can be built. We need more information, we have to get the conversation going — but also ensure that we’re regularly managing expectations with our clients.

The way to do this is to factor in all of the information you have right now. That information might be incomplete, but it can provide useful context to the customer. An example of this might be:

“Hey, I’ve seen the part you’ve sent over. It’s going to take me some time to quote properly, but based on your requirements I’m expecting this to come in at the $5k–$8k range. Does that align with your expectations?”

This is a subtle, yet powerful exchange to weave into your requirements gather process, because you are constantly sense checking that you are aligned with the customer and, importantly, getting them bought into investing time with you.

It’s, of course, extremely important to qualify your statements with “based on your requirements” because the customer may have neglected to include some important information at the beginning, or may simply have forgotten.

If you apply this at scale, you can save a considerable amount of time eliminating prospects who are not ultimately going to be a purchaser. Over the course of a year, it could save you many hundreds of man-hours.

Applying this at scale

If you really tried the experiment I just outlined, you’ve probably realized that even a small business process change like that can have an out-sized impact on your sales’ team performance.

The question now is, can we use this to unblock our sales process?

As your business grows, you should prioritize time spent with high-value clients who are likely to grow with you in the future. That can make it difficult for you to find time for new customers, which presents an obstacle to growth. This is one of the concepts of the Three Virtues of Manufacturing.

After all, new customers turn into large clients eventually, and a prototyping order can sometimes turn into a very valuable ongoing project.

The trick is to find ways of making it easy for your smaller, more prospective clients and to invest more time into the relationships that have a higher current-value. This is where instant and algorithmic quoting tools can really help.

You can think of these tools as the ‘sense-check’ estimate we discussed earlier. They are on your website, giving your customers a sense of what the order is likely to be valued at. This helps them qualify themselves as one of your customers, and if the order is simple, might even convince them to pay upfront.

Furthermore, your internal business development staff are able to use algorithmic quoting to respond to customer inquiries themselves. In my experience, I’ve usually found that Business Development staff are relieved to see such a system implemented, because they are often nervous about whether they are estimating accurately or not.

If you execute this correctly, you can often reduce the need for manufacturing staff to get involved early in the sales pipeline, and your Business Development process can look more like this:

Obviously this isn’t a one-size-fits-all model, but we’ve seen time and again that it can substantially optimize internal operations within machine shops. Imagine if your team only had to quote high-value, qualified orders and didn’t need to worry about the risk of the customer ghosting you? Wouldn’t that be a huge win?

In summary

Efficient quoting is no longer just a nice-to-have — it’s a key competitive advantage. By implementing the strategies we’ve discussed:

1. Using ‘sense check’ estimates to quickly qualify leads
2. Scaling this approach across your sales process
3. Leveraging algorithmic quoting tools

You can significantly reduce time waste, focus on high-value clients, and ultimately boost your bottom line. These methods allow you to transform quoting from a drain on resources into a powerful tool for growth and efficiency.

Remember, the goal isn’t just to quote faster — it’s to quote smarter. By adopting these techniques, you’re not only saving time but also improving your ability to win the right jobs for your shop.

Start with the ‘sense check’ method today, and as you grow, consider integrating algorithmic quoting like Phasio to further streamline your process.

Phasio is the leading platform for automating quotations and streamlining internal operations in Machine Shops. We work with manufacturers just like you to help find a suitable quoting algorithm (for example), to deliver these quotes to customers on your website and to eliminated wasted time on the shop floor.

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