You receive a STEP file or PDF drawing from a prospect. Your lead engineer opens it in CAM. Then spends the next two hours:
- Analysing the geometry and complexity
- Simulating cycle times on your machines
- Checking material costs against your suppliers
- Calculating labour and overhead
- Writing up a quote document
The prospect doesn't like the price, so you spend another hour revising it. Three days later, they stop responding.
This happens 10–15 times a week in a typical job shop. Most shops don't track the true cost of this process because it's buried in "engineering time." But when you do the maths, it's staggering.
The Numbers: What Manual Quoting Actually Costs
We analysed quoting data from five UK CNC job shops (all between 8–15 people). Here's what we found:
- Average time per quote: 1.5 hours (including revisions)
- Quotes per week: 12 (range: 8–18)
- Total quoting time per week: 18 hours
- Lead engineer hourly cost (loaded): £45–60
- Weekly quoting cost: £810–1,080
- Annual quoting cost: £42,120–56,160
For a 10-person shop, manual quoting costs roughly £50,000 per year in direct labour. That's equivalent to half a person's salary.
But Wait—There Are Hidden Costs Too
The £50k labour cost is only part of the picture. There are secondary costs that most shops never quantify:
Slow Response Time
Because quoting takes time, prospects don't get quotes the same day. By day 2, they've moved on to your competitors who responded faster. We estimate this loses approximately 1 in 5 bids to slow turnaround.
Inconsistent Pricing
Different engineers quote the same job differently. One applies a 25% margin, another 30%. Your profit margins swing wildly depending on who quoted the job. Over a year, this probably costs you 2–3% of overall margin (think £50–150k depending on revenue).
Opportunity Cost
While your lead engineer is quoting, they're not managing production. That means:
- Production problems get addressed slower
- Quality issues take longer to escalate
- Your best person is tied up in admin, not engineering
The Quoting Problem Gets Worse As You Grow
As a shop grows, quoting volume increases but the time per quote doesn't decrease. You hire another person just to handle quotes, or your lead engineer becomes a full-time quoting machine instead of managing production.
One shop we spoke to had hired a part-time admin person specifically to handle quoting. They were paying £15/hour for someone to:
- Collect drawings from customers
- Pass them to engineering
- Format quotes into documents
- Send them out
That's £30,000 per year just to manage the administrative side of quoting. The engineering time is still on top of that.
What Good Quoting Looks Like
The best shops we've worked with have figured out how to quote faster by:
- Using parametric pricing rules (if part weighs under 5kg, material is X, labour is Y)
- Capping quote time at 30 minutes per job
- Having a second person review and approve quotes before sending
- Responding to prospects within 24 hours (ideally same day)
The shops doing this consistently win more bids because they're faster and their pricing is consistent. They also have their lead engineer back in production where they belong.
How AI Quoting Changes The Game
Upload a STEP file. AI analyses geometry and complexity. System applies your pricing rules. Quote generated in 60 seconds.
Your engineer reviews it (2 minutes, not 90), maybe tweaks margin for a strategic bid, sends it out.
That's 1.5 hours down to 10 minutes. Even if AI gets the geometry slightly wrong on 1 in 5 quotes (it doesn't, but hypothetically), you've saved 80% of your quoting time.
For a shop currently spending £50,000/year on manual quoting, cutting that to 10–15 minutes per quote means you get most of that time back. Your engineer goes back to engineering. You respond to quotes faster. You win more bids.
The Real Cost of Doing Nothing
If you're currently quoting manually, you're not just paying the direct cost (£50k/year). You're also paying for:
- Lost bids due to slow response
- Inconsistent margins
- Opportunity cost of your best engineer doing admin work
- Administrative overhead to manage the quoting process
The total cost is probably closer to £80–120k per year in a 10-person shop.
Software that cuts that by 70–80% pays for itself within the first quarter.