NIST 800-171 is coming, and everyone in defense manufacturing needs to be compliant. If you’re not ready, you’re setting yourself up to lose a key part of your business – and putting national security at risk. In America, we project our power and defend ourselves with military technology. The Department of Defense and Intelligence Community … Continued
“Every decision that could have the slightest impact on the customer must be carefully considered before moving forward. As we move into the digital era of customer service, that is more true than ever. A customer is not a transaction or account number. A customer is a human being.” – Shep Hyken, Customer Service Expert, … Continued
Many shop owners know but turn a blind eye regarding the inconsistency of quoting by the estimating team. I did for a long time until we ran an experiment that forced me to take the first steps to making RAPID’s quoting more consistent. Here is the experiment. Pick ten parts that your estimating team has … Continued
Automation of quoting has many advantages – it returns quotes to customers faster, provides more consistent pricing from part to part, removes the rote tasks of quoting which frees up time for more value-add tasks and reduces the cost of quoting. As a bonus, you can add expedited delivery and price options for specific part … Continued
Secure websites are especially important for job shops who are increasingly under attack. Do you have an RFQ form on your website? Do you accept file uploads? Not only do these need to be secure, but you also need to instill confidence in potential parts buyers that you know what you’re doing. It all starts … Continued
The Paperless Parts team is constantly pushing updates to help your shop win more jobs and grow your business. However, we also have a lot of functionality that you might not be aware of that are built to help improve your workflows. Here are 3 features that you may have missed on the platform: 1. … Continued
With a quarter trillion (roughly 247 billion!) emails being sent per day, it’s easy to say your inbox should be the last place you’re running your business from. This is tough because you may have spent thousands of dollars on a website and click ads to push potential new customers to a “Contact Us” form … Continued
We have some big updates this week on Paperless Parts including the new Operations interface, new manufacturing processes, better tracking of quote views, and improvements to Online Metals pricing recommendations! Quote with the New Operations Interface We received a lot of feedback on the old quoting interface. Customers often asked us where the pricing … Continued
In part 1, we spoke about the biggest challenge to selling your manufacturing business – you. We outlined how shop owners become a single point of failure by performing too many critical business functions. These include business development, sales, and estimating. By doing this, when business owners try to exit, they end up leaving too … Continued
In a previous blog post I posed the question “How much would you pay for a RFQ?” As you start driving more RFQs to your shop, you need to track the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns. One simple way to do this is to ask “How did you hear about us?” on your RFQ form. … Continued