Automating quotes: from drawing to 3D design

Why quoting stays slow

At a company that builds to order, every sale starts with the same ritual. A plan comes in, a drawing or a set of measurements. Someone experienced sits down with it. That person reads off what is needed, gathers the parts, adds up the quantities and pours the lot into a quote. Usually it is also the person who handles the difficult files and who has known the customers longest.

That is the bottleneck. The calculation hangs on one or two people. Someone who starts next month does not simply take that work over, because half of the knowledge is written down nowhere. A request that arrives on a Thursday evening sits there until the estimator finds room for it. Meanwhile the customer calls, because he asked the same question elsewhere too.

There is something else. Anyone making the same kind of calculation a hundred times a year does not make it the same way every time. Two requests for almost identical work get a different price, because one was calculated on a quiet morning and the other between two meetings. Nobody notices that difference. It surfaces when the margin at the end of the year comes in lower than expected.

From plan to design to quote

The chain starts with the file the customer sends anyway. A plan, a dimensioned drawing, sometimes a completed form with sizes and quantities. Out of it come the values the calculation needs: the measurements, the positions, the chosen materials and the connections that hang off them. How complete that file is decides how much of the rest runs without intervention. A plan carrying every measurement is a different starting point from a sketch with three figures next to it.

Those values go to a calculation tool that applies your company's rules. The rules determine which parts are needed, in which size and in what quantity. Two things come out, and they hang together. You get a design you can view and turn in three dimensions, so what is being proposed becomes visible. With that design comes a quote in which every line traces back to a part you can see sitting in it.

That last point is where a lot of argument disappears. A quote showing only a total invites haggling. When the customer can point at the part an amount comes from, the conversation turns to the job instead of the price.

If the job goes ahead, the same values do not have to be entered again. The same design produces the files that let work preparation and the machines carry on. We have built configurators of this kind. That is also why the data has to be structured from the first step. A drawing that exists only as a picture yields no production file.

Where the calculation rules come from

The rules inside such a tool are not ours. They come out of your company. They are the standards you follow, the tables your estimator knows by heart, the rules of thumb nobody ever wrote down and the exceptions you allow for certain customers. In practice such a rule sounds very ordinary. Above a certain length you pick the heavier version as standard, unless the customer explicitly asks for something else.

Writing them down is the real work. Walking through an existing file regularly shows that two people apply the same rule differently. Or that a rule has been running for years without anyone remembering why. Those conversations are uncomfortable and they return the most. What is fixed afterwards holds for everyone working with the tool.

We turn those rules into a calculation engine that gives the same answer to the same input every time. When a supplier price changes or a new type of part is added, the rule is adjusted and every quote after it follows the new version. Who made that change, and when, is in the activity log. That is not only handy in a dispute with a customer. It is what you need when your accountant or your insurer asks how an amount came about.

Where the person makes the click

No quote leaves without somebody having seen it. The tool prepares a proposal, with the design alongside it and the lines that follow from it. Your estimator opens that proposal, checks whether the plan was read correctly, adjusts what needs adjusting and only then releases it. What gets released is what the customer sees.

That step does not quietly disappear later. A plan can be unclear, a measurement can be missing and a customer sometimes means something that appears nowhere on the drawing. A calculation tool does not notice and carries on with what it did read. Anyone sending a proposal out without a check is selling something nobody has looked at.

What does change is where your estimator's attention goes. The adding up, the looking up and the retyping fall away. What remains is the judgement. That is the part where experience actually counts. Nobody else can take it over.

What this is not

This does not replace your engineer. The tool follows the rules laid down in advance and nothing beyond them. A final calculation, an inspection or a signature under a calculation stays the work of the person qualified to give it. That person also decides when a file falls outside the rules and has to be looked at separately.

Nor is it a package you switch on that takes over the way you work. The rules have to be written down, the data has to be right and somebody has to check the proposals. Without those three things the finest calculation tool produces proposals nobody trusts.

Companies where the same kind of request comes back every week in a different size get the most out of this. If the calculation sits entirely in one person's head and no file resembles the last one, there is other work to do first. The question that settles it is a simple one: how many of your calculation rules are written down somewhere today?