A 90 day plan to halve your quoting time
Two conditions decide whether this plan survives contact with a busy quarter, and both are worth settling before week 1.
It needs one owner with authority over the estimating calendar, not a committee, and it needs the general manager to agree in advance that weeks 1 to 4 change nothing, because the instinct to start fixing during the measurement block is what usually destroys the baseline the whole exercise depends on.
Halving quoting time sounds like a technology project, which is why it usually never starts. It is closer to a measurement project with a technology ending, and the useful version fits in 90 days, runs alongside normal work, and spends nothing at all for the first month.
What follows is the plan as we would run it, in 3 blocks of 4 weeks, each with a deliverable a GM can inspect.
Weeks 1 to 4, measure without flinching
You cannot shorten a process you have not timed, and almost no floor has timed its quoting. For 4 weeks, log every request that arrives, every one, including the ones nobody intends to answer.
For each, record 5 dates, when it arrived, when someone first opened the package, when pricing started, when the internal review happened, when it left.
Record who touched it and how long their touch actually took, because the gap between touch time and elapsed time is the entire finding, the anatomy laid out in the response time argument.
Two practical rules keep the log honest. Give it one owner, the estimating lead or whoever runs sales operations, because a log everyone owns decays in a fortnight, and have the owner spend 10 minutes each Friday closing the week’s entries rather than reconstructing them later from memory, which produces fiction.
Measure before you fix.
And log the declines and the silences with the same care as the quotes, since the requests nobody answered are the most important rows in the file, the population counted in the real cost of a quote your team never sent.
Resist fixing anything yet. The temptation to tidy as you measure is strong, and it contaminates the baseline you will need in week 12. The deliverable is one sheet, average and worst-case elapsed time, average touch time, the count of requests that expired unanswered, and where the waiting concentrated.
Expect touch time near 4 hours and elapsed time near 2 weeks, and expect the unanswered count to be the number nobody in the room can defend.
Weeks 5 to 8, remove the hand-offs
The measurement will show that the days live between people, so this block restructures the sitting rather than the staff. Three changes, none of which cost money.
First, a same-day takeoff rule, the package gets opened and read the day it arrives, every file, using a 20 minute package sheet, so the queue at least forms behind an informed decision instead of an unopened folder.
Second, a standing daily quote session, 45 minutes, estimator and specialist in the same room, working the active quotes together instead of mailing them to each other, which converts 2 day hand-offs into 2 minute conversations.
Third, a triage rule with teeth, every request gets an explicit answer inside 48 hours, quote, decline, or a dated promise, because a fast no preserves a relationship that a silence quietly spends.
Days live between people.
The daily session needs a shape or it becomes another meeting. Ten minutes of triage on what arrived since yesterday, using the package sheet from the same-day read.
Then the active quotes in age order, oldest first, each one either advanced in the room or given a named blocker and a date. Nothing is presented, nothing is statused, the quotes are worked, together, with the drawing open.
The decline half of the triage rule needs equal respect, a 2 line note that says thank you, this one is outside our process fit, sent inside 2 days.
The fastest way to shrink the queue is to stop letting requests you will never price age inside it, and the buyer who got a fast honest no sends the next request anyway.
By week 8 the elapsed time on ordinary quotes should be inside 3 days, on process changes alone, and the log will prove it against the week 4 baseline.
This is also the point where the remaining constraint becomes visible, the pricing itself still takes the hours it takes, and the specialist is still the bottleneck for anything unusual.
If you want the same-day version of this plan demonstrated on one of your own parts rather than described, book a demo and bring the package from a quote you sent last month.
History is an afternoon away.
The people question deserves saying out loud in this block, because removing hand-offs sounds to an estimator like an argument that their checking step was waste. It is the opposite.
The specialist’s judgment is the most valuable input in the process, which is exactly why it should arrive while the quote is being built rather than 2 days after, when half of it is spent reconstructing what the estimator already knew.
Frame the change as moving expertise earlier rather than reducing it, and the daily session gets attended willingly instead of resented.
Weeks 9 to 12, price from history
The last block attacks the hours inside the touch, and this is where tooling earns a place, because the biggest remaining time sink is rebuilding knowledge that already exists.
Assemble your closed jobs, quotes and actuals, most floors find 500 or more in the ERP and the quote folder, and put them where pricing can lean on them, so a new request starts from the closest parts you have already run, their real cycle times, and what they actually cost against what was quoted.
Rebuild the burdened rates for the 3 or 4 work centers that carry your volume while you are at it, since history priced through a stale rate repeats the stale rate faster.
Assembling the history is less archaeology than it sounds. The quotes live in a folder of PDFs and spreadsheets, the actuals live in the ERP’s job cost reports, and the join between them, quote number to job number, is the afternoon of clerical work that makes the whole record usable.
The plan ends. It keeps paying.
Do not wait for perfect. A history with gaps beats a blank sheet on every quote, and the gaps themselves are informative, since the jobs nobody can reconcile are usually the jobs that went wrong in ways worth knowing.
Whether the leaning then happens through a configured system, a platform, or a disciplined internal library is the evaluation covered in the buyer’s guide, and the week 4 log is exactly the evidence that evaluation needs.
Run the pilot the same way regardless of vendor, one already-quoted part, the package as it arrived, checked line by line against the number your team sent.
What goes wrong, and what to do about it
Three failure modes account for most stalled attempts. The log dies in week 2, because logging felt like overhead during a busy fortnight, which is why it needs a named owner and a Friday ritual rather than goodwill.
The daily session gets cancelled the first week it collides with a shipping crisis, and once cancelled it never returns, so protect it the way a production meeting is protected and keep it at 45 minutes so it is cheap to defend.
And the history block expands into an infinite data cleanup project, which is avoided by timeboxing it, 2 weeks to assemble what exists, gaps accepted, rather than waiting for a record nobody will ever finish.
There is a fourth risk that is easier to miss. Halving quoting time increases the number of quotes going out, which increases the number of awards, which lands on a floor that did not plan for it.
Tell operations what is coming in week 8, before the answers start arriving faster, because a quoting improvement that surprises the scheduler is a delivery problem wearing a success story.
Week 12, the honest comparison
Close the loop the way you opened it, with the log. Elapsed time against the baseline, touch time against the baseline, and the count of requests answered against the count that used to expire. Halving elapsed time is the floor of what the process changes alone deliver.
The history block is what moves touch time, and it is also the change that keeps improving after day 90, because every job that closes from here on makes the next quote slightly better informed. The plan ends, the compounding does not.