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Reduce Quote Turnaround Time In Manufacturing using AI

  • Writer: Atishay Jain
    Atishay Jain
  • 2 days ago
  • 4 min read

Updated: 19 hours ago



Reduce Quote Turnaround Time Manufacturing


1. Why Reducing Quote Turnaround Time In Manufacturing Is Must?


Every custom‑steel mill and profile shop I visit loses money in the same dusty corner: the lag between an RFQ landing in the inbox and a price landing in the customer’s. Buyers open three tabs, fire off the same drawing, and hand the job to whoever replies first and sounds competent. If you’re not top‑of‑inbox in hours (not days), you’re seasoning your competitor’s steak.

That gap is called quote turnaround time. In 2025, slashing it is the cheapest way to win extra tonnage and reduce ETO cycle without another furnace, press, or hire



2. The Everyday Stuff That Drags Quotes Out

  1. Tribal knowledge buried in Barry’s head  and Barry retires next spring

  2. Specs scattered across ERPs, network drives, dusty binders, and “check page 7 of the old Swiss job”

  3. Overloaded engineers who answer the same “Can we roll 1.4571 at 6 mm wall?” fifty times a week

  4. Manual drawing checks: zoom in, count corners, chase tolerances, guess scrap

  5. Copy‑paste gymnastics between Excel, email, and the ERP just to populate a BOM

Result? Two‑day average reply. The customer is already in someone else’s pipeline.



3. Traditional Fixes (and Why They’ve Peaked)

  • Quote templates - good for standard beams, useless for three‑radius laser‑welded octagons

  • Hiring more estimators - payroll climbs, knowledge still siloed

  • ERP plug‑ins - fine for catalog items, choke on custom alloys

  • Lean workshops - posters go up, habits slide back

These tactics nibble minutes instead of biting off the days we need to win.



4. Enter Mavlon: AI Sales Engineer Built for ETO Steel

Mavlon is not generic chatGPT‑on‑top. It’s a purpose‑built AI that reads your historic emails, CAD files, routing sheets, and tribal stories  then answers RFQs like your sharpest senior engineer would, only faster and without coffee breaks. In short reduces quote turnaround time in manufacturing

Four Pillars

  1. Ingest Everything  PDFs, STEP, DXFs, BOMs, even those blurry fax scans

  2. Vector Search + Structured Memory  finds the right past job in milliseconds

  3. Spec Understanding  extracts alloy, wall, tolerance, finish like a pro

  4. Explainable Answers “Yes, we can. See Job #4381, same alloy, ran on Line 3 last July”



5. How We Reduce Quote Turnaround Time Manufacturing (Step by Step)

  1. RFQ Drops In Sales rep drags the email into the Mavlon chat or forwards it. Done.

  2. Instant Feasibility Scan AI parses the drawing, matches dimensions and alloy to prior production data, and flags machine limits in five seconds.

  3. Auto‑Draft Quote Skeleton Mavlon pulls current scrap, labor rates, and overhead from your ERP, then builds a cost roll‑up. The rep tweaks markup in line.

  4. Engineering Sign‑Off (Optional) If tolerance hits an edge case, the engineer gets a one‑click “approve / adjust” card no 20‑message thread.

  5. PDF + Email Out The customer receives a clean quote with source‑linked confidence notes. Turnaround: thirty minutes tops, often less than ten.

Every loop above is laser‑focused to reduce quote turnaround time manufacturing without adding headcount.




6. Dollars and Sense : ROI Math in Plain Talk

Metric

Before

After

Lift

Quotes per week

25

60

+140 %

Conversion rate

28 %

46 %

+64 %

Avg. order value

$18 000

$18 000

—

Extra revenue / wk

—

$315 000

—

With a conservative 15 % margin, that is $47 000 extra profit every week.



7. Objections I Hear at Trade Shows


“Our data is a mess.” Mavlon learns from messy. The first pass indexes emails; structure comes later.

“IT won’t allow cloud.” Run on‑prem. We ship a Docker bundle, and your steel specs stay behind your firewall.

“AI hallucinations?” Every answer cites the source file. No source, no answer simple rule.



8. Future‑Proofing: What Happens After You Nail Turnaround


  1. Dynamic pricing tied to live scrap and energy costs

  2. Predictive capacity  AI books slots before planners see the calendar

  3. Auto‑generated case studies for new markets (already in testing)

Getting quotes out fast is step one; owning the data loop is the long game.



9. Quick‑Start Checklist


  1. Pick 500 successful jobs and upload

  2. Sync ERP rates with one API key

  3. Whitelist the sales inbox so RFQs flow in

  4. Run a shadow week and compare AI answers

  5. Flip the switch when accuracy exceeds 90 % (usually day five)



10. FAQ - Rapid Fire


Does it replace estimators? No. It wipes their grunt work so they focus on tricky value adds.

CAD formats? STEP, IGES, DXF, solid PDF, or even a phone photo in a pinch.

Language support? English, German, Italian right now; more coming.

Security audits? SOC 2 Type II in progress with full access logs from day one.



11. Final Word from a Mill Rat Turned Tech Founder


I love the smell of hot scale and the sound of a punch press at 6 a.m. What I hate is watching good steel shops lose bids because email ping‑pong stole the clock.

Mavlon exists to give custom manufacturers their time back. Time turns into faster quotes, faster quotes turn into won deals, and won deals keep furnaces lighting our skylines at night.

If trimming days to minutes sounds useful, book a demo or just comment to this article. I read every note myself.



TL;DR (because yes, 4 minutes)

  • Customers decide in hours

  • Quote delay is profit leakage

  • Mavlon’s AI reads specs, finds past jobs, and drafts quotes

  • Typical reduction: 2 days → less than 1 hour

  • ROI shows up before your next melt

That’s the skinny on how to reduce quote turnaround time manufacturing with brains, not brawn. Go steal back your hours.


 
 
 
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