“How long from ‘can you make this’ to a price in the customer’s inbox?” I asked the sales manager of a 55-person metal fabricator. He laughed. “Four days. If it’s simple.”
His counterpart in the estimating office didn’t laugh. She said the real number was closer to six, because two of the four days were spent walking the shop floor looking for a similar job from last year.
The real cost nobody had written down
This company quoted about 210 jobs a month. Of those, roughly 60 were won. The other 150 took up the same estimating time. At an average of five hours per quote, that’s most of two full-time salaries producing nothing but politely-worded emails.
The bigger leak was elsewhere. Customers who needed a fast answer stopped asking, because they’d learned the answer would arrive after their own deadline.
What the estimator actually needed
She didn’t need a faster calculator. She needed to see, in one screen, every part the shop had cut in the past two years with the same material, thickness, and bend count — and what it took to make each one.
- Past jobs searchable by material, thickness, and number of operations, not by customer name she’d have to remember.
- Actual hours from the floor attached to each finished job, so the next quote used real numbers instead of the estimate from the last estimate.
- A short list of standard operations with rates that only two people could change, so quoting couldn’t drift on its own.
- Quote status visible to sales — sent, viewed, chased, won, lost — with a reason recorded on every loss.
None of that is exotic. What made it work was the discipline of recording actual hours, which took six weeks of nagging before floor supervisors trusted that it wasn’t a tool for blaming them.
Six weeks later, the same question
I asked again: how long from enquiry to price in the inbox? The sales manager said 40 minutes for repeat work, and same-day for most of the rest. Quote volume went up to 280 a month without hiring.
Win rate moved from 28% to 34%, which surprised everyone until we looked at the lost-quote reasons. Half of them had been price. But a solid share were “we didn’t answer in time.” Those simply stopped happening.
If you run a job shop, pull your last 20 lost quotes and write down the reason next to each. If more than two say “too slow” or “no reply,” the fix is worth more than any price adjustment you’re considering. That’s the kind of finding an ERPNext Consulting review surfaces in the first week, before anyone touches settings.