Use case · Mechanical engineering
In mechanical engineering a quotation carries more than a price: drawing, material, production route and delivery date have to line up before a number comes out of them. Which is exactly why the road from enquiry to quotation ties up the people who ought to be designing.
Typical scope: one process
What is different here
STEP, DXF or a dimensioned PDF, often with a bill of quantities alongside. What has to be read out of it is material, tolerances, quantity and surface specifications - and they are rarely in the same place as they were for the last customer.
Almost nobody calculates a part from scratch. You look for the most similar completed part in the ERP and add or take off from there. That is a search across characteristics which often do not exist as fields in the system at all.
Weeks pass between costing and order, and steel, aluminium or copper prices do not stand still in that time. Anyone who does not factor in a quotation's validity period gives away the margin or loses the order.
If yours is not listed, that is not an exclusion. Where no interface exists, we build one - that is the most demanding part and it is our trade.
Where parts are made to drawing, the basis of a quotation is a technical document, not a form. The system has to be able to read what was drawn, not what was typed in.
The difference
A person does itThe system does it
How it runs today
How it would run with us
What it gets you
Where it does not fit
If every enquiry is a one-off and there are no comparable jobs, there is little to gain here. The benefit comes from repetition, not from intelligence.
Where parts are made to drawing, the basis of a quotation is a technical document, not a form. The system has to be able to read what was drawn, not what was typed in. Whether it pays for you depends on your volume - the audit establishes that.
Yes. The ones listed are those we most often meet in mechanical engineering - a list, not a precondition. Where no interface exists, we build one.
Read access to the quotations closed over the last twelve months - that is where the system learns your costing logic, not from a formula. Access to the ERP, or at least a regular export of jobs and prices. A contact in sales who has two to three hours a week for questions during the first weeks. Nothing more is needed to start.
Across 30 real past enquiries the draft falls within your usual price tolerance in at least 80 % of cases. Every unclear item is flagged - nothing is quietly guessed. No quotation leaves the building without a person releasing it.
4 to 6 weeks to the first productive run.
The draft is produced independently; the release is always a person. A quotation is a binding document - it never leaves the building unseen.
If every enquiry is a one-off and there are no comparable jobs, there is little to gain here. The benefit comes from repetition, not from intelligence.
This page shows the fit in mechanical engineering. The process itself is sector-independent - what matters is whether it repeats.
Quotations in generalYou tell us where your time goes. We put it in writing: what is worth automating, and roughly what that costs.
