5 Things I Wish Shop Owners Knew About Estimating

When I was an estimator, I often spent the first half of my morning figuring out where every open quote stood. I had sticky notes all over my desk to help me keep track. I’d check whether an outside processing quote had come back and which customers needed an answer that day. And if a hot RFQ came in overnight, that could derail my plans for the rest of the day.

I had to sort all of that out before I could start the work I was actually there to do, and at the time I just accepted it as part of the job. Since joining Paperless Parts, I’ve seen how a lot of other manufacturers quote, and it turns out most estimators spend their mornings the same way I once did.

Every shop has its own process, but experienced estimators everywhere spend a surprising amount of time making up for gaps in the workflow around them. Some of that difficulty comes with the job, since it takes years to learn. But a lot of it is just their process getting in the way.

An owner trying to get quotes out faster might look at hiring another estimator or finding a better way to calculate runtime. I know how much work either approach can leave untouched, and I see it even more now as I help other manufacturers work through their quoting processes.

Here are five things to keep in mind before throwing money at your problem:

1. Make intangible tribal knowledge as tangible as possible

A model gives you geometry, and a print gives you dimensions and tolerances. You still need to understand how the part functions in the larger assembly, because that can change how you manufacture it.

I used to quote navigated instruments with an Northern Digital Inc. (NDI) ball on the end that had to be in a precise geometric relationship to the tip. Without understanding the tolerances of the whole system, I could plan how to make each component and still miss what the finished instrument needed to do. I might’ve needed to change our entire manufacturing process to account for that requirement.

Before I started costing, I needed to know whether our equipment could reliably hold the tolerances and whether we’d need outside processing. I also had to consider the customer and the work already on the floor. An RFQ from an engineering team we worked well with was a different prospect from a part we’d never made for a customer we’d never worked with. You learn a lot of that by working in a particular shop (even the most seasoned estimator can move to another company and still need time to learn what its machines can hold).

I kept a running list of “gotchas” from problems that came up after jobs got to the floor. If a tolerance, feature, or material gave us trouble, it went on the list, and I accounted for it the next time similar work came in. Most people never even knew I did this, because when they worked well, nothing happened – the old problem just didn’t come back.

The most valuable thing you can do to improve your quoting process and help your business grow is to start capturing estimator know-how and making it accessible to other people. Otherwise, you’re missing out on RFQs that your estimator can’t get to in time, and they can never take a day off because it’s too risky to pass the work off to anyone else.

2. The right price is the price your customer is willing to pay

A lot of shop owners assume there’s one correct price for a part, sitting there waiting for someone to calculate it. Your internal costs matter, of course, but the market has a say in the final price too, and you’re up against other shops that might approach the same part differently.

In my experience, competitive quotes would often come back within 10% to 20% of each other. If we were 50% or 60% higher, it didn’t matter how confident we were in our process, we probably weren’t going to win.

For a long time, my sense of what the market could stand came from thousands of anecdotes (add those stories to the long list of things to make sure someone’s writing down). I knew which customers we usually won, which parts looked like work already running on our floor, and when an RFQ looked like something we’d historically had trouble pricing competitively.

If your shop is capturing customer history, an estimator can look at product categories, past pricing, and win rates and see whether the shop really is expensive on a certain type of work. Then it’s a lot easier to decide when to adjust a price and when to stand behind it.

3. Runtime gets blamed for more than it causes

When I talk with machine shops today, calculating runtime is often the first problem they bring up. I understand why they want to get it right; in my own estimating work, though, a lot of the time went elsewhere.

On a complex RFQ, I could spend around 40% of my time reviewing the print and understanding which requirements would affect how we made the part. That was before accounting for the time I spent entering information or keeping track of outstanding quotes.

A faster runtime calculation would still have left me with all of that work. I’d look at how much time an estimator spends checking quote status or entering the same information in different systems before assuming runtime is the biggest opportunity to save time. Cutting out the duplicate entry would have let me handle more RFQs while spending just as long on each runtime calculation.

4. Before adding more estimators, standardize estimating

In a smaller shop, it’s easy to stay in constant contact with the people you need to weigh in on a job. I talked to our salesperson on the phone five or six times a day, and if I needed engineering, I’d walk a few desks over and ask. But nobody was capturing those conversations; once the quote became an order, everyone had to remember what we’d talked about and what we’d agreed to do, which gets harder as a company gets bigger (eventually, we started capturing those conversations in Paperless Parts so the answers would still be there when we needed them).

Shops trying to get from $6 million or $7 million to more than $10 million often assume estimating capacity will scale at the same rate as everything else, but it usually doesn’t. You pick up new customers and work you haven’t done before. Win rates can drop, so you have to quote more just to book the same amount of business.

Hiring another estimator adds capacity, but it also means teaching someone how your shop quotes. Without a shared process, that person starts developing their own approach. When you keep adding people that way, you can just wind up with several estimators making different decisions about the same work.

At my former company, we developed standards for what sales needed to provide to estimating and how much detail estimating needed to include when a quote became a job. Ensuring smooth handoffs meant also ensuring everyone could meet their slightly different goals:

• Sales could win the work
• Estimating felt more confident we could make money on it
• Engineering knew how we planned to manufacture it
• Operations felt assured we could deliver it on time

Of the customers I’ve worked with since joining Paperless Parts, I’d guess 60% to 70% have gotten some of their biggest wins from making their estimating process more consistent and easier to hand off.

5. Audit your process before you digitize it

When you adopt new technology, the comfortable move is to recreate your current process exactly the way it is. A bad process doesn’t get better just because it’s digital now, though.

“If all hell broke loose and you had to get a quote out today, what would actually need to happen?” I ask shops that a lot, because their answer helps separate the actual work that’s required from the steps that have piled up over the years. Most processes have an extra review or two, some duplicate data entry, or a workaround someone put in years ago for a problem that might not even exist anymore. If you’re entering the same information twice anywhere, decide where it needs to live before you recreate both steps in a new software.

Before I came to Paperless Parts, I sometimes thought our quoting process was uniquely complicated. Now that I spend my days talking with a lot of different estimators at a lot of different shops, I know everybody’s still figuring it out. There’s no single estimating process that works for every manufacturer, because no two shops run the same machines for the same customers.

What you can do is make your process clear enough that someone else could pick it up, and get the important knowledge out of people’s heads and into a system the rest of the team can use. Then your estimators can spend their time understanding the work and figuring out what the market will pay for it. That was always the part of the job I wished I had more time for.

Kyle May spent eight years estimating parts for the medical device industry before joining Paperless Parts in February of 2025. At his most recent shop, he oversaw the implementation of Paperless Parts and began using it to quote complex, precision-machined components faster and more consistently. Today, he helps manufacturers improve their quoting processes, bringing firsthand experience with the work and decisions that go into getting a quote out the door.