Prioritizing both Speed and Accuracy in the Quoting Process

Our client has been manufacturing high-precision metal and plastic products across a wide variety of industries and functions for decades. They aim to be a one stop shop for customers, comprehensive manufacturing services, from prototyping to production.

At the same time, the reality of the manufacturing space is that, when it comes to winning jobs, speed is the most important component. Being able to provide a quote as quickly as possible is the most reliable way to improve your win rate for new jobs. But if the quote isn’t accurate, the quality or turnaround time will suffer.

In order to properly research new jobs and provide accurate quotes, the manufacturer would cross-reference new requests with old work. This is the best strategy for estimating new costs. However, if searches are slow or give incomplete or inaccurate results, the entire quotation process can grind to a halt. Our client found that each search could take up to 30 minutes to get the correct information. In trying to improve this time, they discovered CADDi.

Process Acceleration for Quoting with Advanced Data Access using CADDi

With CADDi, search speed improved from upwards of 30 minutes to just a minute or two. Users in the manufacturer’s sales engineering team can take drawings, specifications, or any other provided information from the RFQ and instantly gather any and all similar drawings to use as reference. CADDi’s patented drawing similarity search uses bespoke AI to take one drawing and find any that overlap in shape and structure, allowing users to find the right references without needing to remember any labels, part IDs, or file locations.

{"name":"Member", "title":"Tooling Estimator Team", "image":"Image1"}
"The similarity search has just been fantastic."

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Once reference drawings have been found, CADDi brings together all of the information needed to make an accurate quote. Over a million of the manufacturer’s past documents, including sales orders, past quotes, non-compliance reports, and more, have been loaded into CADDi and linked for instant cross-referencing. Users can get a complete picture of a previous project, allowing them to accurately estimate what the new job will ultimately cost, and giving them a starting place to plan the production work. Previous production challenges for similar projects can be proactively addressed, rather than repeated.

By drastically reducing the time for each search, and making each search more accurate and impactful, the manufacturer can finish quotes faster than ever without sacrificing accuracy. Best of all, these productivity gains are available to everyone: new hires can operate just as effectively as veterans with easy access to decades of past data.

As the manufacturer has come up to speed on using CADDi, they find themselves using it for more and more quotation requests. The Tooling Estimator team estimates that CADDi is being referenced for around 75% of their requests now, a number that will only increase as more team members integrate it into their workflows. The manufacturer plans on expanding its usage of CADDi further, using it to consolidate and standardize their design work.