Field notes on quoting.

Programs

What net 60 actually costs you on a program

Working capital is real money and almost nobody prices it. The cash gap from material purchase to payment received, costed, and how to recover it discreetly.

AUG 10, 2026 · 8 MIN READ

Programs

How to fill a customer's cost breakdown form

Open book costing from the supplier side. Which tabs get scrutinised, how to make the numbers reconcile to your own quote, and why consistency is the defence.

AUG 05, 2026 · 9 MIN READ

Programs

How to handle an annual price-down request

Where cost reduction can genuinely come from, where it cannot, and why a supplier who can show today's cost line by line negotiates from a different position.

JUL 31, 2026 · 9 MIN READ

Programs

What PPAP actually costs, and who pays for it

A Level 3 submission broken into its 6 cost elements, whether it belongs in the piece price or on its own invoice, and what a print change does to it.

JUL 26, 2026 · 9 MIN READ

Buying

Quoting software for manufacturers, an honest buyer's guide

The spreadsheet, the platform, the in-house build and the configured system, compared on cost, time to live and fit, with the vendors named.

JUL 24, 2026 · 9 MIN READ

Technology

How to pull a bill of materials off a drawing

Where the parts list actually lives on a sheet, what a balloon promises, what to do when the list and the views disagree, and the items hiding in a note.

JUL 22, 2026 · 8 MIN READ

Process

How to cut RFQ response time from 10 days to 1

Where the 10 days on a quote actually go, why hand-offs cause most of them, and what changes commercially once the answer comes back the same day.

JUL 21, 2026 · 8 MIN READ

Point of view

CAD to cost, or pricing from job history

Geometry-first tools estimate what a part should cost in theory. History-first pricing starts from what it did cost on your machines, and compounds.

JUL 17, 2026 · 8 MIN READ

Technology

STEP, IGES, DXF, what each file actually gives an estimator

What STEP, IGES and DXF each carry, what they quietly drop, and why none of the 3 tells you the tolerance or the finish that most of your cost depends on.

JUL 16, 2026 · 8 MIN READ

Estimating

How to quote a machined part, line by line

A complete build-up on one turned part, bar stock to sell price. Material, routing, cycle and setup, tooling, outside processing and margin, line by line.

JUL 14, 2026 · 9 MIN READ

Technology

What to do when the RFQ arrives as a scanned PDF

The scanned print is the most common package there is and every CAD-dependent tool is useless against it. How to work one fast, and when to ask for the model.

JUL 11, 2026 · 8 MIN READ

Estimating

How to price outside processing without guessing

Provisional plating and heat treat numbers quietly eat margin. Minimum lots, source approval and getting supplier quotes in before the price is set.

JUL 10, 2026 · 8 MIN READ

Estimating

What a burdened rate actually includes

What belongs inside a burdened rate, what quietly gets left out, and how an understated rate loses money invisibly across a multi-year program.

JUL 07, 2026 · 7 MIN READ

Technology

AI for manufacturing quoting, what works and what does not yet

Which parts of quoting are actually solved, which are half solved, and which are still a person. Written for somebody who has sat through the demos already.

JUL 06, 2026 · 9 MIN READ

Point of view

The real cost of a quote your team never sent

No report carries a line for the contract that was never close enough to lose. The throughput arithmetic of the 80 requests that quietly expire.

JUL 03, 2026 · 8 MIN READ

Technology

Can AI actually read an engineering drawing

Vector sheets give geometry directly and scans do not. Why whole-sheet extraction loses resolution, what still fails, and why confidence scores matter.

JUL 01, 2026 · 9 MIN READ

Measurement

Quoted against actual, auditing your own estimates

The most valuable report nobody runs. Comparing what you quoted against what the job cost, which operations drift, and why the drift is rarely random.

JUN 27, 2026 · 8 MIN READ

Point of view

Why your quote win rate has little to do with your price

Buyers assemble the shortlist with the answers in hand, so arrival order shapes the decision before price is compared. Speed moves win rate first.

JUN 26, 2026 · 8 MIN READ

Measurement

How to track quote win rate so the number means something

One floor can report 20, 30 or 44 percent depending on the denominator. What to count, what to segment, and the trap of improving a ratio by quoting less.

JUN 21, 2026 · 8 MIN READ

Process

How to read an RFQ package before you price it

What to pull from the prints, the specs and the commercial terms in the first 20 minutes, and the 3 items that most often become unpriced risk.

JUN 19, 2026 · 8 MIN READ

Measurement

Why you lost the quote, and how to actually find out

Most losses get recorded as price because nobody asked. How to run a loss review, what buyers will tell you, and the 4 reasons hiding behind the stated one.

JUN 16, 2026 · 8 MIN READ

Process

A 90 day plan to halve your quoting time

Weeks 1 to 4 measure the current process honestly, weeks 5 to 8 remove the hand-offs, weeks 9 to 12 price from history. A plan a GM can actually run.

JUN 12, 2026 · 9 MIN READ

Process

RFQ, RFP and RFI, what a manufacturer needs to know

The 3 documents from the supplier side, what each one signals about where the buyer actually is, and why treating an RFI like a quote wastes a week.

JUN 11, 2026 · 8 MIN READ

Process

When to no-quote, and why saying no faster makes money

A no-quote on day 1 is free and on day 8 it costs 4 hours and a customer. The 6 signals that should stop a quote before an estimator ever opens the model.

JUN 06, 2026 · 8 MIN READ

Estimating

What perishable tooling costs per piece

Inserts and drills priced per piece on one operation, why the cheapest insert is often the dearest line, and what a tool change costs in machine minutes.

JUN 01, 2026 · 8 MIN READ

Materials

How to price material when the market moves under you

Firm prices against indexed ones, how a quarterly index clause actually works, and what a supplier carries holding a price for 12 months on volatile bar.

MAY 27, 2026 · 8 MIN READ

Estimating

What tooling actually costs, and who ends up owning it

Hard tooling against soft, amortising over year one or the whole program, and the ownership question the customer's form answers before you read it.

MAY 22, 2026 · 8 MIN READ

Estimating

How to price scrap and yield into a quote

A scrap percentage added at the end prices every loss the same. Where it happens in the routing decides what it costs, and the arithmetic is not hard.

MAY 17, 2026 · 8 MIN READ

Estimating

How to calculate a machine shop rate that covers your costs

One machine shop work center costed from the ground up in 7 layers, then divided by the hours you actually sell rather than the hours the machine is on.

MAY 12, 2026 · 8 MIN READ

Materials

Make or buy, when a casting beats a billet

The make or buy decision between casting and machining from solid, with the arithmetic for finding the crossover volume instead of asserting a number.

MAY 07, 2026 · 8 MIN READ

Estimating

How to quote Swiss machining work

Why Swiss machining cost behaves differently from chucker work, what bar feeding and the sub-spindle do to the number, and where the volume crossover sits.

MAY 02, 2026 · 8 MIN READ

Estimating

How to quote an assembly when the BOM has 3 levels

Rolling child costs up a 3 level bill of materials, where scrap compounds through the levels, and why 2 percent lost at the bottom is not 2 percent on top.

APR 27, 2026 · 9 MIN READ

Estimating

How to quote a weldment without losing the fit-up

Weldment estimating goes wrong at the fixture, not the arc. Where the hours actually sit on a fabricated frame, and the largest line nobody costs.

APR 22, 2026 · 9 MIN READ

Estimating

How to quote a sheet metal part

One bracket priced line by line, from nesting yield through cutting and forming to plating, including the 2 things estimators miss most often on formed parts.

APR 17, 2026 · 9 MIN READ

Buying

The quoting spreadsheet, and the week it stops working

A fair account of the quoting spreadsheet, the 4 ways it fails, and what to audit inside it before you let anybody sell you a replacement for it.

APR 12, 2026 · 9 MIN READ

Buying

Should-cost software, and where it actually fits

Should-cost software was built for the buyer across the table. What that means for a supplier pricing their own work, and the 2 cases for running one.

APR 07, 2026 · 9 MIN READ

Buying

Should quoting live inside your ERP or beside it

The honest case for the ERP quoting module, the 3 places it stops, and why the answer is usually reading from the ERP without putting the logic in it.

APR 02, 2026 · 9 MIN READ

Buying

CNC machining quoting software, what actually matters when you choose

Six questions that separate the tools worth buying from the ones that only work on clean CAD, and the one problem no quoting software can solve for you.

MAR 28, 2026 · 9 MIN READ

Buying

Paperless Parts alternatives for job shops and contract manufacturers

An honest comparison of 6 ways to quote faster, what each one fits, and where each one stops. Written by a vendor who tells you which option is theirs.

MAR 23, 2026 · 10 MIN READ