How fast do you quote? Measure it
The clock nobody watches
Every shop tracks win rate. Almost nobody tracks the number that quietly drives it: hours from RFQ received to quote delivered. Buyers with a job to place operate on momentum, and the first credible number in their inbox anchors the decision. Late quotes do not lose on price. They lose on already-decided.
If you have never measured your clock, it is longer than you think, because the RFQs that sat in someone's inbox over a weekend do not announce themselves.
Measure it this month
The measurement is one column in a spreadsheet: when the RFQ arrived, when the quote went out. A month of data answers three questions:
- Your median clock, the honest number, not the best-case story
- Your worst decile, the RFQs that took a week, and what they had in common
- Where the time goes: waiting for review, waiting for a material price, or just waiting to be noticed
Where the hours hide
In most shops the actual estimating is a fraction of the clock. The rest is queue time: the RFQ waiting to be seen, the half-built quote waiting for one number, the finished quote waiting for a signature. Queue time is exactly what automation removes, the RFQ logged and acknowledged the hour it arrives, the historical comparables pulled before the estimator sits down, the nudge when a draft has been idle.
Shops that do this compress days to hours without anyone estimating faster.
The competitive window
Fast quoting used to require overstaffing the front office, so nobody did it. Now it requires automation most of your competitors have not built yet. That gap will not stay open forever. The build itself is on the fabricator page; the measurement you can start Monday.
The audit answers this for your business
Two weeks, $2,500 flat ($1,000 for the first three clients), and you get the map of your own automatable work with dollars on it.