The 7 Fatal Mistakes of Quoting – #5: Having a Single Point of Failure

So far in this blog series, we’ve talked about four fatal mistakes of quoting: treating every quote the same, wasting time quoting low dollar value jobs, responding too slowly, and failing to reference past quotes.

This blog post will focus on fatal mistake #5: having a single point of failure.

Many job shops have only one person who does all the quoting for the company, and this creates a massive risk; when this person gets sick, moves, or retires (taking all of their tribal knowledge with them) and you lose the ability to quote for a day, a week, or a month, your business could take a huge hit.

The person responsible for quoting is one of the most skilled and knowledgeable people in the business. If you don’t have automation and standardization built into your quoting process, even if your estimator is in the office, oftentimes that person is so bogged down with manual, duplicative tasks that he or she isn’t available to focus on high value projects, meaning opportunities for new revenue get missed.

According to the 2022 Aptean Manufacturing Survey Report, “4 in 10 manufacturers say being caught up in day-to-day demands is the biggest barrier to reaching their 2022 business goals, and this is being fueled by under-resourcing and skills shortages.”

So how can you avoid becoming vulnerable to this risk?

1. Start training others in your shop to quote. Investing time into training other employees to take on quoting responsibilities is the best way to eliminate that single point of failure. Implementing technology that allows trainees to access all the information they need can enable them to make informed decisions on their own. Additionally, it can be useful to implement a tiering system for your quotes (e.g. easy/medium/hard) to help experienced estimators determine which quotes can be delegated.
2. Establish an automated quoting process. Having a solution that automates the costing and pricing of your quotes, you could train even the most junior person to quote. Inputting the domain knowledge of your quoting experts and your engineers into a software solution that employs a geometry-based approach to determine the manufacturability of the job based on your shop’s capabilities is the first step in freeing yourself from that single point of failure. It also expedites the quoting process and frees up time for your most experienced employees to focus on tackling more strategic business initiatives.

Start Building Up Your Defense Today

At Paperless Parts, we empower job shops to eliminate single points of failure by automating their quoting process. Our geometry-driven quoting, secure file-viewing and sharing capabilities, online collaboration and CRM tools, interactive digital quotes generator, and other modern technology solutions are helping manufacturers across the U.S. quote faster, win more work, and grow their business.

Click here to skip through to fatal quoting mistake #6 now.