Fast Quotes, Better Margins: How Manufacturing Cost Estimation Helps You Win the Right Business

Key Takeaways

• Quoting fast gives you an edge, but combining speed with data-driven accuracy is essential to secure profitable work with minimal uncertainty.
• Faster cost insights mean you can quote competitively without sacrificing profit on the final product—helping you win more work, remove inefficiencies, improve cash flow, and strengthen long-term customer relationships.

The Full Article

The speed and accuracy of your quotes can be the critical difference between winning and losing new business. Your team is under constant pressure to deliver competitive bids quickly while ensuring healthy profit margins.

What if you had a powerful intelligence tool that provided rapid, reliable cost insights, empowering you to generate winning quotes faster and with greater confidence in their profitability?

Enter the realm of Manufacturing Intelligence. Specifically, how solutions like aPriori Technologies are transforming estimating and quoting – via automation – into a strategic weapon for securing more profitable new business.

For too long, quoting processes have relied on manual cost calculations and cumbersome methodologies, historical data that may be outdated, and often, a degree of guesswork. This can lead to slow turnaround times, inaccurate pricing that either loses deals or erodes margins, and a lack of transparency that hinders effective customer communication. aPriori revolutionizes this process by providing instant access to detailed, physics-based manufacturing cost estimates, enabling your team to quote with unprecedented speed and accuracy.

Did you know that, on average, your customers’ RFQ process can take anywhere from 12 to 20 weeks? Of that timeline, three to four weeks are often spent simply waiting for suppliers to respond with a quote.

From Hours to Minutes: Turbocharging Your Quote Generation

aPriori dramatically accelerates the quoting process by providing on-demand cost analysis based on the specific design and manufacturing processes requirements of each BID opportunity. Imagine being able to:

• Instantly Generate Reliable Cost Estimates: Instead of spending hours or even days manually calculating costs in Excel and with limited information, aPriori provides a detailed breakdown in minutes. Simply import the design data, and the system simulates the manufacturing production process, delivering a comprehensive cost estimate.
  • Soucy accelerated the quoting process dramatically, cutting the time spent preparing each quote from eight hours down to one—freeing up seven hours per opportunity to focus on higher-value work.
• Quickly Analyze “What If” Scenarios: Customers often request variations or alternative specifications. With aPriori, you can rapidly analyze the cost implications of these changes, allowing you to provide quick and accurate revised quotes, increasing your responsiveness and chances of winning the deal.
• Access a Centralized Cost Knowledge Base: aPriori builds a consistent and reliable cost knowledge base within your organization, eliminating the reliance on individual spreadsheets and potentially outdated information. This ensures consistency and accuracy across all quotes.
• Integrate Seamlessly with Existing Systems: aPriori can integrate with your CRM and other business systems, streamlining the entire quote-to-order process and reducing manual data entry and potential errors.

Quote with Confidence: Ensuring Profitable Wins

Speed is crucial, but profitability is paramount. aPriori empowers your team to quote not just quickly, but also with a deep understanding of the underlying costs, leading to more profitable new business:

• Data-Backed Pricing Decisions: Instead of relying on guesswork or simply undercutting competitors, aPriori provides factual cost data to support your pricing strategy. You get detailed breakdowns of raw materials, labor, and production costs, insights into whether to manufacture in-house or outsource, and a clear analysis of trade-offs like overtime or subcontracting.
• Transparency and Justification: The detailed cost breakdown generated by aPriori provides transparency into your pricing. This allows your sales team to better communicate the value to customers and justify the quoted price, building trust and reducing price negotiations.
• Identify Opportunities for Value-Based Selling: Understanding the cost drivers allows you to identify areas where you can offer customers cost-effective alternatives or optimize value-added service opportunities, potentially increasing the overall deal value and profitability.
• Minimize the Risk of Underpricing: By providing an accurate and comprehensive cost picture, aPriori significantly reduces the risk of underpricing projects and eroding your profit margins.

When you compare this to China—widely regarded as a global supply chain powerhouse—the difference is striking. In many cases, Chinese suppliers return RFQs within days rather than weeks. According to sourcing experts and research from Boston Consulting Group, this faster turnaround is driven by a combination of agile procurement capabilities, strong infrastructure, dense industrial clusters, and streamlined quoting systems that outpace much of the rest of the world.

With market dynamics shifting rapidly due to global trade disruptions, the competitive landscape is only becoming more challenging and uncertain. Suppliers who adopt similar approaches to China’s “speed advantage” stand to gain a decisive edge.

For example, a global Tier-1 automotive supplier recently partnered with aPriori to reduce its RFQ response times from up to 90 days down to just 5—an initiative the company calls achieving “China Speed.” This digital transformation underscores how advanced costing and quoting platforms can help suppliers compete in a world where responsiveness increasingly determines who wins the business.

Strategic Advantage in a Competitive Landscape

In today’s market, being the first to respond with a competitive and accurate quote can be a significant differentiator.

aPriori provides your quoting and estimating teams with the strategic advantage they need to:

• Improve Win Rates: Faster turnaround times and more competitive pricing, backed by accurate cost data, will lead to higher win rates.
  • Flex transformed its quoting process with aPriori, driving RFQ win rates up from 15% to 68%—a dramatic improvement that helped secure more high-margin opportunities.
• Increase Profitability per Deal: Quoting with a clear understanding of costs ensures healthy margins on every project.
• Enhance Customer Satisfaction: Providing quick, accurate, and transparent quotes builds trust and strengthens customer relationships.
• Free Up Estimator Time for Strategic Activities: Automating and accelerating the cost estimation process frees up your team’s valuable time to focus on more strategic activities, such as analyzing complex projects and developing winning bid strategies.

Empower Your Quoting Team with Manufacturing Intelligence

Equip your quoting and estimating professionals with the speed, accuracy, and confidence they need to win more profitable new business. aPriori transforms quoting from a reactive task into a proactive strategic advantage, driving revenue growth and ensuring the long-term profitability of your manufacturing organization. Embrace the power of manufacturing intelligence and empower your team to quote with confidence.

See where you stack up in your estimating efforts. Take the quiz today.