What should a manufacturer automate?

Every queue in a machine shop is visible except the one that matters most. Work in progress is on the floor, material is on the racks, finished goods are by the door — and the RFQ backlog is a list on one person's screen. It is the constraint on how much work the shop can win, it is invisible to everyone including frequently the owner, and it is where automation has the most to offer.

The first thing to automate is acknowledgement, and it is nearly free. An RFQ that arrives and receives nothing for two days tells a buyer something about the shop before anyone has looked at the drawing. An immediate reply confirming receipt, naming what was received, and stating when a quote will follow costs nothing and is the single most common gap in the sector. It also creates the timestamp that makes turnaround measurable, which no shop can currently produce reliably.

The second is triage at receipt, and it is worth more than any speed improvement in pricing. Three tests resolve most RFQs in minutes: is it inside the capability envelope, is it above the economic floor, and does the buyer's decision date fall inside a window the shop can meet. A system that applies the first two mechanically — checking size, material, process and quantity against the shop's stated envelope — and routes the rest to a person removes work from the constrained resource rather than making the constrained resource faster. That is the higher-leverage intervention and it is the one shops skip.

The third is status on the way out, and it addresses the complaint industrial buyers make most. A buyer who has placed an order is reporting internally on it, and every unanswered request for an update costs them credibility with their own colleagues. Automatic notification at defined points — order acknowledged, material received, in production, shipped with a tracking reference — removes a category of phone call entirely and is generally available from systems the shop already runs but has not configured.

What should stay with the estimator is the pricing of anything non-standard, and the reason is specific rather than sentimental. A quote is formed from a drawing, a material specification and a judgement about setup, fixturing and risk. Where parts genuinely repeat with parameterised variation a configurator can price them, and where they do not the configuration effort exceeds the quoting effort. Automating the wrong half here produces fast quotes that get revised, and a revised quote costs more credibility with a buyer than a slow one.

One further item is worth naming because it is unglamorous and consistently valuable: quote follow-up. Quotes are returned and then sit, and shops rarely have a rhythm for chasing them because the estimator has moved on to the next one. A scheduled follow-up that asks a specific question — whether the decision date has moved, whether anything in the specification changed — recovers work that was lost to nothing more than silence on both sides.