How Industry 4.0 Shops Respond to RFQs

Every sale starts with an RFQ, and how quickly you turn around a quote directly impacts your shop’s bottom line. As customer expectations rise, many CNC shops have lost business precisely because of slow and inefficient quoting processes.

Inundated sales engineers can’t keep up with today’s customer’s expectations.

Responding to quote requests and managing orders takes time. It’s often more than one person alone can manage, even if they’re working to their full capacity. Sales engineers are juggling so much that they often can’t quote faster than within three days, even if it only takes an hour to generate an individual quote. By the time the quote is ready, most customers, especially new ones, will have already found another shop.

Solving the Sales Bottleneck

Once a shop owner identifies the source of their sales pipeline’s congestion, they often try to eliminate the bottleneck by adding more sales personnel.

Hiring another sales engineer might lead to faster quotes: if one engineer can sell 50% of the time, two can sell 90%, easily doubling and possibly tripling profits. But there are additional costs that can offset whatever is gained. It takes time to bring a new hire up to speed. Odds are that they won’t significantly increase the machine occupancy rate that first year, but their competitive salary starts on day one. Taking the whole picture into account, the owner likely won’t be left with much income.

You can only gain from automation.

Automation eliminates wasted time, with consistency and accuracy that a human cannot match, no matter their level of experience or attention to detail. The immediacy of automated quotes is perhaps the only way to keep up with today’s customer.

In contrast to the uncertainty of a new hire, technology offers reliability. Some of the subscription software available today could take your shop’s machine occupancy rate to 90%, in which case profits would increase by 400%. Even if the subscription software falls a little short and only takes the occupancy rate to 65%, profits would still more than double.

Even if you ultimately get the same profits through automation that you do by adding another sales engineer, you’ll still walk away with more: you won’t have to spend hours on training, and you won’t lose money while waiting for your new hire to develop the necessary institutional knowledge.

In short, automated quoting is the quickest entry point to Industry 4.0, and guarantees survival in a crowded and quickly evolving market.

“We were able to streamline the process, offering faster quoting and shorter overall turn times. DigiFabster helps us stay competitive and grow our business with less overhead cost.” Sebastián Podesta, Owner at Fácil 3D

This article is an excerpt from our guidebook: A Guide to Today’s CNC Customer: Winning them over with sales automation