Zero Hour Parts is a rapid prototyping CNC machine shop that used to have an arduous quoting process. It slowed them down and left them vulnerable to making errors on tight tolerance work.
Now, with Paperless Parts’ fast, centralized quoting engine with part recognition and manufacturability warnings, Zero Hour Parts can promise 4-hour max quote turnaround times and prevent mistakes before they happen. They have also been able to:
- Increase quote throughput by 200%
- Return a quote for a critical environmental emergency job 9x faster than they previously would have been able to and won
- See happier customers with faster turnaround times and as a result, quote and win 10% more work
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Read the Full Zero Hour Parts Customer Testimonial Transcript
**Video type:** First-person customer testimonial
We are the end of the road for a lot of companies and engineers. When you can’t meet your deadline, we can. We’re going to do it better, and we’re going to do it faster.
Zero Hour Parts is a rapid prototyping machine shop. We regularly receive requests for next-day turnarounds, and that is not outside the realm of possibility for us.
We serve a wide range of industries, including aerospace and medical prototyping. Really, if something is complicated and other people don’t want to touch it, we get involved.
We run titanium parts with very tight GD&T tolerances nearly every day, and we deliver those parts within our standard 10-day lead time. We’ve been told that others in the industry offer six weeks as their standard lead time. We’re beating that by a month, and we offer expedited turnarounds of as little as 24 hours.
Our goal is to return quotes to customers in under four hours and show that we can get them their parts as quickly as possible. Before Paperless Parts, we weren’t close to consistently meeting that four-hour quoting window. Now, we operate within it.
We run a very tight schedule because we need to know where each window of opportunity exists. Quick-turn prototyping is the nature of our business.
Before Paperless Parts, quoting was very cumbersome. We used an Excel spreadsheet, and before that spreadsheet was created, we quoted using a Texas Instruments calculator. It was a long, drawn-out, paper-based process to accurately estimate jobs and return quotes to customers.
Paperless Parts has streamlined that process and minimized the chance of missing features that could negatively affect profitability or lead time.
Paperless Parts has made quoting easy. I don’t spend nearly as much time calculating run times and evaluating capacity across the shop.
The immediate time estimates and calculations Paperless Parts provides have significantly reduced the amount of time I spend reviewing quotes. When you’re completing as many quotes as we do each day, ease of use is extremely valuable.
One of the biggest advantages of Paperless Parts compared with our old system is its part recognition. It immediately lets me know when a part is something we’ve made before. I can pull up the previous file, confirm the information, and send the quote right out.
I went from completing around 10 to 15 quotes per day to more than 30 on busy days.
Paperless Parts recently helped us with an expedited job for a customer who needed parts as quickly as possible. We provided a quote in less than four hours for something that probably would have taken us a day and a half to quote previously.
We were able to submit the quote even though our customer service manager was off-site. Everything was still facilitated, the quote reached the customer, and we ultimately won the job and saved the day for them.
We have a lot of talented programmers and machinists at our disposal. When you also have software that can keep up with those capabilities and serve as a valuable tool, it makes a big difference.
We’ve definitely seen happier customers. We’re completing work faster, returning quotes sooner, and winning more jobs.
Once we show customers that we can return a quote in under four hours and manufacture the part as quickly as they need it, they come back.
I think Paperless Parts would be a fantastic investment for anyone looking to reduce human error, improve accuracy and consistency, and identify features that could otherwise be missed because of complex geometries or multi-axis requirements.
I would definitely recommend Paperless Parts. It has given us a much more flexible approach to quoting. After using Paperless Parts, I would never go back to an Excel spreadsheet. It simply makes quoting so much faster.
Paperless Parts is a real game changer. I would recommend it to anyone besides our competitors. They don’t need it.