The bottleneck
"Four days to turn a quote. By the time we got it back to the customer, they'd already moved on. We were winning 22% of bids — not because our price was wrong, but because we were too slow. Thirty percent of the time, the job was already gone."
Great Lakes Fabrication runs custom weldments — complex, high-mix work where every job needs a fresh set of eyes. Their estimator was spending 3–4 hours per quote, cross-referencing labor rates, material costs, and overhead from memory and a spreadsheet. The process was slow, error-prone, and completely dependent on one person.
Competitors with faster turnaround were scooping up work the estimator hadn't even had time to price. The owners knew it — but without visibility into the actual cost of a job, they couldn't tighten the process without risking accuracy.
What we built
Three interconnected modules to tighten the quoting loop and keep margins visible in real time:
Quotes
Same-day quoting with margin guardrails baked in. The estimator builds each quote with actual labor hours and material costs — not gut feelings — and the system flags when a margin is running thin before it goes out the door.
Active Projects
Capacity visibility for the whole team. When a quote lands, the shop knows whether they have the bandwidth to hit the delivery date — before committing to it.
Cash Flow
Job profitability tracked in real time. Every job's actual costs get logged against the quote — so by the time the next similar job comes in, the estimator has real data to price it with.
What changed
| Metric | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Quote turnaround | 4 days | Same day |
| Bid win rate | 22% | 38% |
| Jobs lost to slow quotes | 30% | Under 10% |
| Estimator time per quote | 3–4 hours | Under 1 hour |
"We were losing work not because our numbers were wrong — we just couldn't answer fast enough. Now we can." — Estimator, Great Lakes Fabrication
Note: Case studies are based on real shop archetypes. Details are fictionalized for privacy.