More Work Is Coming. Choose Carefully.

Custom part manufacturers already know what a busy quoting inbox feels like: the urgent RFQ with half the files missing, the drawing package that arrives in pieces, the buyer asking for price breaks by Thursday afternoon, the job that looks fine until page 47.

And in the POWER 2026 opening keynote, Paperless Parts Co-Founder and CEO Jason Ray predicted that the next five years will be the most significant and most consistent demand this industry has ever seen.

This growth is fueled by exceptional demand in a few key markets:

• Commercial aerospace is working through long backlogs.
• Defense spending continues to climb.
• AI data centers need a staggering amount of physical infrastructure, and the energy buildout behind those data centers brings its own pull on the industrial base.

For shops, it is welcome news. But while a busier RFQ pipeline can bring better opportunities, it can also introduce more risk. As Ray put it, “More demand doesn’t always equal more value.”

The pressure behind the RFQ inbox

Paperless Parts is now seeing 50,000 quotes a week move through the platform, a strong signal of the pace many manufacturers are already feeling firsthand.

On the data center side alone, Ray pointed to projections that compute capacity will need to double over the next five years. That means somewhere between 1,000 and 2,000 new data centers, plus the power infrastructure required to support them. And each data center contains more than a million components, many of them moving through the same industrial supply base already quoting aerospace, defense, and energy work. Then beyond the physical components of the data centers is another massive buildout in batteries, generation, natural gas, solar, wind, and grid infrastructure.

Most shops are not waiting around with extra estimators and capacity. In fact, many are busy working through labor shortages.

Regardless, demand still must pass through the front office first.

“We had a customer who had a 40,000 part number RFQ with a one-week response time,” Ray shared.

A package that large needs to be quickly diagnosed: What looks risky? What is missing? Will this job actually be profitable?

Quote triage helps shops get on target faster before spending half a day on the wrong work.

No-quoting as a strategy

One of the more interesting points from Ray’s keynote was that Paperless Parts’ most successful customers, measured by revenue, no-quote more than other customers.

No-quoting can sound negative, especially in a market where buyers are sending more work, and everyone wants to grow. In practice, it can be a sign of a more disciplined front office.

Every shop has work it knows it should avoid; maybe the part is outside its preferred size range. Maybe the tolerance stack-up creates too much risk. Maybe the quote depends on an outside process vendor that is already a question mark. Maybe the job is technically doable, but not the kind of work the business wants more of.

The problem is that those patterns often surface too late. An estimator has already opened files, chased the buyer, reviewed the print, and started building the estimate before the team admits the job was never a great fit.

Ray said Paperless Parts did not have no-quote functionality in the beginning. It wasn’t until later when a customer requested it be added to help them move poor-fit work out of the process earlier so they could spend those estimating hours elsewhere.

Estimators live in a messy world

If every RFQ arrived with complete CAD, matching part numbers, current specs, and the right supporting documents, rising demand would be a lot easier to absorb. But, as Ray explained, technical data degrades as it moves through the supply chain.

An OEM may begin with a strong CAD model, a full drawing package, defined requirements, and detailed specifications. By the time it’s passed from engineering, to sourcing, to a manufacturer, the package has been saved down, split up, redacted, reshared, or separated from the files that gave it context.

By the time it reaches another supplier, the shop may be looking at one page from a larger drawing set, missing a model, or staring at a print that references requirements that nobody included in the technical data package.

“We’re consistently seeing a declining fidelity of technical data,” Ray said.

This creates expensive little traps:

• A material callout conflicts with the email.
• A part number does not match the drawing.
• A note references a spec the buyer forgot to attach.
• A requirement sits in a corner of the print where it is easy to miss and painful to discover later.

Ray described centralization as one of the biggest sources of value customers get from Paperless Parts. Our costing and pricing automation may stand out in a sales demo, but the deeper operational benefit is bringing the quoting process into one place.

Otherwise, quoting data has too many hiding places:

• A little information in email.
• A little information in Excel.
• A note in the ERP.
• A drawing in a shared drive.
• A CAD model on someone’s desktop.
• A customer preference stored in the memory of the person who has quoted that account for years.

One experienced person may be able to hold that setup together for a long time, especially in a smaller shop. But today, higher RFQ volume is pressure-testing everyone’s systems or exposing a lack thereof.

In order to capitalize on today’s rising demand, estimating must change from a single-player game to a multiplayer game. Complex quotes may need sourcing input, engineering review, sales context, and a gut check from someone who knows how similar jobs behaved on the floor.

When the work is scattered, collaboration becomes slow and overly personal. When quoting is centralized in one place, estimators gain a bird’s eye view that helps them make more business-minded decisions. There is still judgment involved, just judgment that has better, more accurate information supporting it.

AI should earn its place in the workflow

Scott Sawyer, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer of Paperless Parts, brought the AI portion of the keynote back to the files estimators handle every day: the ones with old drawings and dense information that are poorly scanned before landing in their laps.

Paperless Parts recently launched the latest version of its AI-assistance tool, Wingman™, which detects details like surface finishes, bend lines, chamfers, threads, dimensions, tolerances, feature control frames, holes, countersinks, and counterbores.

The model is also getting better at reading the structure of a print. It can identify title blocks, notes lists, 2D and 3D views, and related callouts that belong to the same feature.

That is a useful boundary for manufacturing; shops do not need AI floating off to the side of the quoting process, creating another place to check. They need help inside the workflow, where the software can surface the technical details that affect risk, fit, pricing, and review.

The final decision still belongs to the people who know the machines, the vendors, the customer, and the business.

The opportunity cost of quoting poor-fit work

A hotter market gives shops more chances to win. It also makes the cost of poor-fit work easier to feel.

Every quote consumes time. Every missing file slows the front office down. Every requirement found too late eats into margin. Every handoff that depends on memory makes the process a little more fragile.

Ray kept bringing the keynote back to the idea of the event’s theme, “focus on what matters.” For shops, that starts before a job ever reaches production. It starts in the quoting process, where the team decides what to pursue and what to leave alone.

There is a lot of work coming into custom part manufacturing. The shops in the best position will be the ones with enough visibility, discipline, and confidence to choose the right work while there is still time to act on it.