Instant Quoting Providers

"Speed is the ultimate weapon in business. All else being equal, the fastest company in any market will win."
Dave Girouard, who built Google’s $1B+ cloud apps business worldwide

Speed is the most important of the three pillars of manufacturing.

Anyone who works in manufacturing learns one thing right from the start: there is a magic triangle of time, cost and quality. You can usually reconcile two things, but fail when it comes to the third factor. Producing high-quality components in a short time is very expensive. To procure high quality components at low cost takes time. On the other hand, it is of course also difficult to procure low-cost components quickly without risking poor quality.

But the interesting point here is that time is the most important factor. If you can reduce the time until the customer has his components in hand, you can justify higher costs. For quality, this is only true up to a certain point, because quality is unfortunately defined from the bottom up. No one requires perfect quality, because it costs accordingly much. Rather, in any industrial sector, sufficient quality is defined to accomplish a task. Those who overshoot the mark when it comes to quality thus have little reason to expect higher profits. Cost as an argument to the customer is also a double-edged sword, because if cost is the only decisive argument, there is almost always someone who might even miscalculate and offer a lower price. No company wants to compete in such an environment.

Speed is therefore a success factor for companies in manufacturing. Speed here means being the fastest to respond to customer requests. But speed also means efficiently handling internal processes so that few resources are spent on non-value-added activities such as purchasing.

Instant Quoting is a revolution in manufacturing

This is exactly where instant quoting comes into play in manufacturing. Instead of spending weeks emailing data and hoping for quotes, instant-quoting manufacturers are taking a different approach: based on CAD data, intelligent algorithms immediately analyze components and assign machines for machining. Based on this data, a price is calculated immediately and the components can be ordered just like in any other web store. This makes ordering not only simple and fast, but also generally more cost-effective thanks to the automated processes.

In addition to the time advantage, there are several other advantages to ordering via instant quoting providers:

• The triangle of time, cost and quality mentioned above can be shifted variably and project-specifically. Many providers offer different quality levels from "Made in Germany" to absolute low-cost solutions. Express options are also common in order to receive components significantly faster at additional cost.

• As a solution provider, you can focus your resources on customer needs and value generation. For very few products, a unique selling proposition is still generated via production quality. As a rule, customer understanding, product features and strong marketing are the greatest competitive advantages of companies. Through instant-quotes, less time is spent on production optimization and purchasing processes, but through efficient and reliable outsourcing, the focus and resources of the company are focused on the customer and the market.

• Of course, there is also a cost advantage. Buying at lower cost means you can realize higher margins, go through more development and optimization cycles, or bring more products to market.

Below you will find a curated list of instant quoting providers for common manufacturing processes.

Read more on our Manufacturing Blog!