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Manufacturing Quotation in 2025 - Challenges and Opportunities
Table of Contents
The Challenges and Opportunities of Manufacturing Quotations in 2025
We all understand that winning work is all about responding to RFQs first. In the manufacturing industry, the first bid is often the one that will be accepted. At the same time, we know there’s big problems with rushing out an inaccurate quotation. Overestimating the cost will lead to rejected bids, while underestimating the cost could make the work unprofitable. Successful sales teams are always trying to increase both the speed and accuracy of their quotations.
Unfortunately, many factors are making this process harder and harder into 2025. But with these challenges come new opportunities to use technology to offset them. Let’s take a look at what challenges sales teams in manufacturing should expect to face and what opportunities they have to overcome them.
The challenges of quotation in the manufacturing industry in 2025
Here are some of the biggest challenges facing sales teams in manufacturing into 2025.
Truly global competition
The state of the global manufacturing supply chain in 2025 will be a period of flux. Tariffs and other geopolitical relationships may make some importing less viable. At the same time, other countries and local options will step up to fill the void. Regardless of how things ultimately shake out, for a while we should expect more competition from more sources for any given RFQ. This competition demands faster and lower bids from each manufacturer if they want to win work.
On top of that, this destabilized supply chain makes it harder for sales teams to ensure accurate quotations. If your production will require component parts sourced from another company, you have a cost estimate for those parts that you factor into your bid. However, in 2025, you may suddenly find that the cost estimate is no longer accurate. This can make a winning bid into a money sink.
Skilled labor shortages
Another major issue that American manufacturers face in 2025 is a shortage of skilled workers. Manufacturing is set to face a major wave of retirement in coming years. This will lead to remaining sales teams having to keep up with fewer people. Moreover, the senior people leaving will be the most experienced and knowledgeable people on their teams.
A lot of good quotation work is borne of experience. Veteran sales people will be able to remember past projects and have intuitions about what future work will cost. This is difficult to capture just with figures in spreadsheets. Even when a newer hire can look back through old jobs with their costs, there’s shortcomings. They have to spend time reviewing each design to see if it’s truly similar in relevant ways. Beyond that, details around the actual cost (as opposed to the quoted cost) may live in other systems which are difficult to connect with past quotations. Veterans often remember these past designs and the outcome of work, making this information accessible quickly. Without them, expect a severe reduction in speed and accuracy.
Increased operational costs
For these and myriad other reasons, manufacturers should expect to face increased operational costs in 2025 and onwards. This in itself puts pressure on sales teams when they place bids on RFQs. First off, increased costs demand that you win more work to remain in the black. This demand compels you to increase your RFQ capacity. At the same time, the margins on your bid versus the actual cost of the work are going to shrink. You have to make more conservative estimates if you want your work to actually be profitable.
These cost-related challenges all exacerbate each other. The temptation will grow to reduce headcount or cut other resources to limit costs. However, this will only make it harder to do the only work that will pull you out of the hole: making fast and accurate quotations that win profitable business.
The opportunities of 2025’s new technologies for manufacturing sales teams
This all sounds pretty bleak, but there is hope. Alongside these emerging challenges are emerging opportunities for companies to improve their quotation process. We’ll present some of these ideas now, but in an upcoming whitepaper we’ll show you more completely how to implement them in your practice.
Turn veterans’ insights into actionable data
As we mentioned, a lot of the insightful experience that leads to accurate and fast quotations lives exclusively in the brains of veteran employees. When those employees leave, so do those insights.
Fortunately, new manufacturing intelligence can capture that data in more meaningful ways. By connecting data from your past bids, your ERP systems, your PLM systems, and more into one data lake, even new hires can track the story of a given project from beginning to end. When they view a new RFQ, they can search not just what was bid for previous projects, but how much those projects ultimately cost, complications that emerged, and more. This leads to more accurate quotations without spending hours connecting the dots.
Link similar RFQs to get faster estimates
When you get a new RFQ, the most valuable information is what you’ve quoted for similar jobs in the past. But a “similar job” is based on the similarities in design, which is difficult to search for. What are the part ID numbers of all the most similar designs that you’ve bid on? There’s no way to know intuitively, and even veteran employees aren’t likely to have them memorized.
The solution to this is in machine vision solutions like CADDi. Our similarity search allows you to search using a design, like the one you receive in an RFQ. CADDi finds all similar designs in your system and surfaces information about them, such as their cost estimates and actual ultimate cost. This turns a tedious, haphazard process of searching through and comparing drawings, which often takes hours, into minutes of looking at search results. There’s no better way to accelerate the speed and accuracy of your quotations.
Highlight design differences to revise quotations effectively
Once you’ve found the most similar reference points in past work, the next important step is to figure out exactly what makes the RFQ design different. This is a more difficult task than it sounds. Small differences in the layout or features of parts can sometimes go unnoticed while requiring an entire additional step in the manufacturing process, which can quickly escalate costs.
Modern manufacturing intelligence software like CADDi can make these comparisons more easily by highlighting differences between drawings. By looking at different similar parts alongside their prices, you can build up an understanding of the relationship between features and prices much more intuitively. This lets even new hires quickly develop the intuition needed to make good quotations from relatively few examples.
How CADDi can help you quote smarter
CADDi delivers best-in-class features for these cutting-edge solutions. We process your drawings and turn them into searchable, insightful, and actionable digital resources. See it in action by walking through a product tour or signing up for a demo.
The Challenges and Opportunities of Manufacturing Quotations in 2025
We all understand that winning work is all about responding to RFQs first. In the manufacturing industry, the first bid is often the one that will be accepted. At the same time, we know there’s big problems with rushing out an inaccurate quotation. Overestimating the cost will lead to rejected bids, while underestimating the cost could make the work unprofitable. Successful sales teams are always trying to increase both the speed and accuracy of their quotations.
Unfortunately, many factors are making this process harder and harder into 2025. But with these challenges come new opportunities to use technology to offset them. Let’s take a look at what challenges sales teams in manufacturing should expect to face and what opportunities they have to overcome them.
The challenges of quotation in the manufacturing industry in 2025
Here are some of the biggest challenges facing sales teams in manufacturing into 2025.
Truly global competition
The state of the global manufacturing supply chain in 2025 will be a period of flux. Tariffs and other geopolitical relationships may make some importing less viable. At the same time, other countries and local options will step up to fill the void. Regardless of how things ultimately shake out, for a while we should expect more competition from more sources for any given RFQ. This competition demands faster and lower bids from each manufacturer if they want to win work.
On top of that, this destabilized supply chain makes it harder for sales teams to ensure accurate quotations. If your production will require component parts sourced from another company, you have a cost estimate for those parts that you factor into your bid. However, in 2025, you may suddenly find that the cost estimate is no longer accurate. This can make a winning bid into a money sink.
Skilled labor shortages
Another major issue that American manufacturers face in 2025 is a shortage of skilled workers. Manufacturing is set to face a major wave of retirement in coming years. This will lead to remaining sales teams having to keep up with fewer people. Moreover, the senior people leaving will be the most experienced and knowledgeable people on their teams.
A lot of good quotation work is borne of experience. Veteran sales people will be able to remember past projects and have intuitions about what future work will cost. This is difficult to capture just with figures in spreadsheets. Even when a newer hire can look back through old jobs with their costs, there’s shortcomings. They have to spend time reviewing each design to see if it’s truly similar in relevant ways. Beyond that, details around the actual cost (as opposed to the quoted cost) may live in other systems which are difficult to connect with past quotations. Veterans often remember these past designs and the outcome of work, making this information accessible quickly. Without them, expect a severe reduction in speed and accuracy.
Increased operational costs
For these and myriad other reasons, manufacturers should expect to face increased operational costs in 2025 and onwards. This in itself puts pressure on sales teams when they place bids on RFQs. First off, increased costs demand that you win more work to remain in the black. This demand compels you to increase your RFQ capacity. At the same time, the margins on your bid versus the actual cost of the work are going to shrink. You have to make more conservative estimates if you want your work to actually be profitable.
These cost-related challenges all exacerbate each other. The temptation will grow to reduce headcount or cut other resources to limit costs. However, this will only make it harder to do the only work that will pull you out of the hole: making fast and accurate quotations that win profitable business.
The opportunities of 2025’s new technologies for manufacturing sales teams
This all sounds pretty bleak, but there is hope. Alongside these emerging challenges are emerging opportunities for companies to improve their quotation process. We’ll present some of these ideas now, but in an upcoming whitepaper we’ll show you more completely how to implement them in your practice.
Turn veterans’ insights into actionable data
As we mentioned, a lot of the insightful experience that leads to accurate and fast quotations lives exclusively in the brains of veteran employees. When those employees leave, so do those insights.
Fortunately, new manufacturing intelligence can capture that data in more meaningful ways. By connecting data from your past bids, your ERP systems, your PLM systems, and more into one data lake, even new hires can track the story of a given project from beginning to end. When they view a new RFQ, they can search not just what was bid for previous projects, but how much those projects ultimately cost, complications that emerged, and more. This leads to more accurate quotations without spending hours connecting the dots.
Link similar RFQs to get faster estimates
When you get a new RFQ, the most valuable information is what you’ve quoted for similar jobs in the past. But a “similar job” is based on the similarities in design, which is difficult to search for. What are the part ID numbers of all the most similar designs that you’ve bid on? There’s no way to know intuitively, and even veteran employees aren’t likely to have them memorized.
The solution to this is in machine vision solutions like CADDi. Our similarity search allows you to search using a design, like the one you receive in an RFQ. CADDi finds all similar designs in your system and surfaces information about them, such as their cost estimates and actual ultimate cost. This turns a tedious, haphazard process of searching through and comparing drawings, which often takes hours, into minutes of looking at search results. There’s no better way to accelerate the speed and accuracy of your quotations.
Highlight design differences to revise quotations effectively
Once you’ve found the most similar reference points in past work, the next important step is to figure out exactly what makes the RFQ design different. This is a more difficult task than it sounds. Small differences in the layout or features of parts can sometimes go unnoticed while requiring an entire additional step in the manufacturing process, which can quickly escalate costs.
Modern manufacturing intelligence software like CADDi can make these comparisons more easily by highlighting differences between drawings. By looking at different similar parts alongside their prices, you can build up an understanding of the relationship between features and prices much more intuitively. This lets even new hires quickly develop the intuition needed to make good quotations from relatively few examples.
How CADDi can help you quote smarter
CADDi delivers best-in-class features for these cutting-edge solutions. We process your drawings and turn them into searchable, insightful, and actionable digital resources. See it in action by walking through a product tour or signing up for a demo.
Ready to see CADDi Drawer in action? Get a personalized demo.
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