All too often, the quotation process within the metals industry consumes valuable time from entrepreneurs. They therefore work more ín than ón their metalworking company. And that’s a shame. More importantly, it is a drag on progress. Recognizable? Keep reading, because things can be different. An automated quotation process gives you, the entrepreneur, the time to move your business forward.
It is a common dilemma. As a business owner, you would like to spend less time creating quotes, but the significant investment of time and money in an additional estimator is holding you back. Perhaps your budget is not adequate or you are reluctant to put a lot of energy into getting the new hire ready. It just so happens that the recruit needs time to get to the desired level. Essential, because those who misjudge their price may well find themselves at the expense of many a profit.
Not a big surprise, then that it’s an exciting step to outsource the quotation process. The consequence of this is that, as a director, you spend a substantial amount of your time working on quotations. Chances are you’ll also have to deal with some workplace issues from time to time. Want to distance yourself from your company in order to look at it from a zoomed-out perspective and work on it? In this respect, you can forget about that. You work primarily ín your company.
Working on your company is crucial for further growth
Working on your company is crucial for further growth of your business. For example, you could improve the marketing of your company. You could also apply new developments in the market within your factory, such as applying machines and software that optimize processes.
Kaizen is the Japanese word for change for the better.
Additionally, you could also do much more forward-looking business. How will the market change over the next few years and what strategy can I outline with that in mind? And you could continuously work on making improvements in your organization. Kaizen, is what it’s called in Japanese: “Changing for the better”.
So instead of being lived by the delusion of the day, and your company just keeps moving along as it always did, you can make much more progress when you start working on your company. Moreover, this also gives you more time with your customer and allows you to better empathize with what is going on in their world, and then adjust your proposition accordingly. Count your winnings.
Automate your quotation process to save time
Properly considered, working ín your business is a drag on the progress of your organization. Fortunately, there is a possibility to remove that drag and create more space to work on your business. Automate your quotation process and you’ll be swimming in time.
There is just one big but: automating the quotation process is complex and time-consuming. At least, if you want to do it yourself. Because then you soon have to create complicated excel sheets. Or you need to connect ERP and CAM systems. A lot of hassle.
Spend eight times less on quotations.
But what if you could have your quotation process automated within three weeks on the basis of a low-profile subscription? Almost too good to be true, but it really is possible thanks to the Quotation Factory. And the results this platform produces are even more magnificent.
Practice has shown that you can spend at least eight times less energy on quotations. So instead of spending all day quoting, this work will now only take an hour. The time savings are huge.
Self-service portal for customers to create their own quotations
It gets even better. Once you have automated your quotation process, you can open a self-service portal on your website. Then you can have all the customers, who usually don’t make very complex requests, create their own quotations in it.
For most metalworking plants, at least fifty percent of their customers are suitable for this, practice shows. There are even examples of companies that have over 75 percent of their customers quoting automatically.
Get back to entrepreneurship and doing with it what you do best
Then experience how much time you can save as an entrepreneur – and the value it brings. By taking this step you can finally start working ón your company. Automatic quoting has its price, of course, but you can also look at it differently. It’s a simple return on investment sum: for the price you’d normally spend on half a full-time (0.5 FTE) estimator, you have your quoting process fully automated, including a self-service portal for customers. You’ll notice it right away: as a director, you can finally get back to doing what you do best: business instead of creating metalworking quotations.