Global Automotive Tier 1 Supplier Selects aPriori to Accelerate RFQ Response Time with Greater Costing Accuracy

The multi-year contract will roll out across all of the company’s global locations, positioning them to respond to RFQs with what this supplier calls “China Speed.”

Too many manufacturers still rely on manual quoting methods. The problem with these methods is twofold. For one, the process is laboriously slow. Two, there is a tendency to underquote or overquote due to a lack of detailed data necessary to quote accurately. The result is missed Request for Quote (RFQ) win opportunities because other competitors were faster or quoted more reasonably. Additionally, revenue is lost due to underquoting and quoting delays.

As a Tier 1 supplier, the client must put significant design engineering effort into its RFQ responses, including figuring out tooling and a multitude of other aspects to ensure deliverability and profitability. When our client received RFQs from customers in the past, they had up to three months to respond. However, recent increased competition from Chinese companies has reduced their response time window to what the client refers to as “China Speed.”  Now, our client has five days to respond to an RFQ instead of three months. Consequently, our client’s win rates decreased because they could not pull data fast enough to respond, forcing them to add high-risk margins in their quotes. These overpriced bids have lost business for them, and worse, flawed bid assumptions added to revenue losses.

aPriori will help this Tier 1 supplier’s design engineering team respond dramatically faster and more accurately to customer requests. Unlike other solutions, aPriori is the only one that automates the quoting process, using a 3D CAD model as the primary input to a digital factory. After an extensive assessment of aPriori, they decided to adopt our solution for the APAC region. However, as the organization began to see its potential, it decided to roll it out globally.