Aurora Machine Saves 5 Hours a Week Quoting with Paperless Parts’ Matching Parts Feature

Background

Aurora Machine was founded by former owner and current Vice President of Manufacturing, Tom Carpenter, in 1999. The Rochester-based machine shop was eventually acquired by brothers Jordan and Jonathan Amoia in 2013 who went on to substantially grow Aurora’s team and customer base. Today, the company specializes in sheet metal fabrication, precision machining, and powder coating with the continued mission of offering a cutting-edge customer experience.

Challenge

Over the years, Aurora’s quoting process was greatly bogged down by inconsistency and inefficiency. Relying on Excel spreadsheets that offered little detail meant that Tom was having to spend time re-quoting parts, which often resulted in customers receiving quotes with different pricing than that of previous quotes for the same parts.

The issue of inconsistency was further complicated when customers requested numerous quantities of the same part to be quoted. Though this is often an expectation of Aurora’s customers, Tom and his team did not have a means of efficiently quoting different quantities, meaning he had to go through the laborious process of manually re-quoting each quantity of parts.

The largest challenge Aurora Machine faced in relation to inconsistency and inefficiency in the quoting process was not having complete records of any of their quoting and estimating. “At the time, we didn’t have any real documentation in the quoting process, everything was just done by me in a spreadsheet,” Tom says. This lack of proper documentation meant there was no way for Tom or any member of the team to go back and track quotes, nor was there a way to provide such information to their customers.

Tom knew that Aurora needed software that would alleviate the burdens of quoting to ultimately make team members’ lives easier and improve the customer experience. Specifically, Aurora wanted a solution that would enable them to reduce their standard process time and achieve consistency. The team researched quoting solutions such as expanding their existing ERP system, as well as using JobBOSS, E2 Manufacturing System, and numerous other solutions with quoting packages. No solution they came across, however, fully addressed Aurora’s needs. The vast majority of solutions are not cloud-based, which would mean putting a strain on Aurora’s servers that the team was unwilling to have. More importantly, Aurora was discouraged by how these solutions lacked a personalized customer relationship.

Solution

When Aurora came across Paperless Parts, they knew they had found the right solution for the company. Tom and his team were drawn to the cloud-based platform that would avoid any strain on the company’s servers, as well as the intuitive interface that made the product easy to use. Above all else, the team was excited about Paperless Parts over their other options because of its strong customer focus; Tom and his team knew that their input as a customer would go directly towards improving the Paperless Parts product.

With Paperless Parts, Aurora Machine now promises a 24-hour quote turnaround time to customers because all quote information is well documented in a centralized location that allows Tom to readily access and verify data. Paperless Parts’ Matching Parts feature has been especially beneficial for Tom and his team, as they can now search any part to determine whether it, or any similar part, has already been quoted in the past. “Before [Paperless Parts], I might have just been scrambling through some notes, now parts just pop up immediately,” says Tom. “I know exactly where the quote is which saves me an incredible amount of time.”

Using the Matching Parts feature, Aurora saves about 5 hours a week quoting parts and up to an additional full day when quoting a large assembly. It also greatly reduces any potential for human error in the estimating process and allows Tom to avoid the risk of sending inconsistent quotes.

Tom Sudek, Aurora Machine’s relationship manager, noted how Paperless Parts’ digital quotes have also helped the company improve its customer experience. “Our customers now know what they’re getting every time,” says Tom Sudek. “And with Paperless Parts’ digital quotes, it’s a really nice, professional quote that our customers receive.”

Results

Using Paperless Parts, Aurora Machine was able to:

• Improve efficiency in the quoting and estimating process: Paperless Parts’ complete documentation and user-friendly interface helps Aurora’s team quickly retrieve important information within every process, ensuring a 24-hour quote turnaround time to its customers.
• Achieve greater consistency across quotes: Aurora’s former quoting process required constant re-quoting of parts, leading to inconsistencies in quotes for the same or similar parts. Using Paperless Parts’ Matching Parts feature, the team can access previous quotes in seconds, saving valuable time and ensuring greater consistency.
• Give more control to other team members in the quoting process: Not only can Tom Carpenter readily access important data for quotes through Paperless Parts, but now any member of the Aurora team can go in and access past quotes.
• Bolster their customer experience: The efficiency and consistency that Paperless Parts provides means that Aurora’s customers receive high-quality quotes quicker than ever. Paperless Parts’ digital quotes ensure Aurora Machine meets the highest professional standards it sets for its customer experience.

Paperless Parts helps Aurora Machine execute its vision of providing the highest level of service to customers while also keeping its promise of taking in Aurora’s input to continuously improve the product. “I’ll say to the Paperless Parts team that if the product had a specific feature, it would make life easier for me, and sure enough, the feature shows up a couple of weeks later,” Tom says. “Paperless Parts actually does what they say they’re going to do.”

“The best thing about Paperless Parts is the amount of information we have at our fingertips for any detail. From the materials to the processes to the margins, it’s all right there and it’s incredible.” – Tom Carpenter, VP of Manufacturing, Aurora Machine