Sample assessment document
Prepared for: a 28-person precision machine shop (illustrative) · Page 1 of 8
Findings summary
- Median RFQ-to-quote time
- 4.6 working days
- Of which waiting on one person
- 3.1 days
- Quotes out inside 24 hours
- 9%
Intake is invisible. RFQs arrive in three inboxes and the owner's cell phone. Nobody can see the queue, so nobody owns it. Two of the 14 RFQs we traced were found more than three days after they arrived.
Pricing waits for the owner. 68% of quotes needed the owner for at least one number. Half of those needed him only because the last similar job's pricing lives in his head.
Nothing happens after send. 11 of the 14 traced quotes got no follow-up of any kind. Both jobs won during the trace followed a same-day phone call.
First change
Route every RFQ to one owned inbox with a 24-hour acknowledgement rule. Cost: zero. Time: one afternoon.
Numbers in this document are illustrative. Your assessment reports your shop's actual timings, traced RFQ by RFQ.
Prepared for: a 28-person precision machine shop (illustrative) · Page 2 of 8
What we traced
We followed 14 RFQs end to end over the trailing 60 days, from arrival to the moment a quote left the building, using timestamps from email, the portal and phone logs plus interviews with everyone who touched them. Rate statistics (win rate, share quoted inside 24 hours) come from the full 12-month quote log of 76 quotes.
| RFQ | Arrived via | Days to first touch | Working days to quote | Outcome |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | Email, sales inbox | 0.2 | 1.4 | Won |
| 02 | Owner's cell, text | 0.0 | 2.1 | Won |
| 03 | Email, owner's inbox | 0.5 | 2.2 | Lost |
| 04 | Phone, front office | 0.1 | 3.0 | No response logged |
| 05 | Email, sales inbox | 0.9 | 3.8 | Lost |
| 06 | Customer portal | 1.1 | 4.2 | No response logged |
| 07 | Email, owner's inbox | 1.6 | 4.5 | Lost |
| 08 | Email, sales inbox | 0.7 | 4.7 | No response logged |
| 09 | Email, owner's inbox | 2.2 | 5.1 | Lost |
| 10 | Customer portal | 3.9 | 5.6 | No response logged |
| 11 | Email, sales inbox | 1.3 | 6.5 | No response logged |
| 12 | Phone, front office | 0.4 | 7.3 | Lost |
| 13 | Email, owner's inbox | 2.7 | 9.0 | No response logged |
| 14 | Customer portal | 4.4 | 11.2 | No response logged |
Median 4.6 working days. Won 2, lost 5, no response logged 7. RFQs 10 and 14 sat untouched for more than three days before anyone saw them.
Numbers in this document are illustrative. Your assessment reports your shop's actual timings, traced RFQ by RFQ.
Prepared for: a 28-person precision machine shop (illustrative) · Page 3 of 8
Where the time goes
Median working days per stage, across the 14 traced RFQs. The stages do not overlap; they sum to the 4.6-day median.
- Arrival to first touch
- 0.9 days
- Technical review, drawings and material
- 0.8 days
- Waiting on the owner for pricing
- 2.4 days
- Quote assembly and send
- 0.5 days
Of the 4.6 days, 3.1 are spent waiting for one person: 2.4 waiting for pricing, and 0.7 inside technical review waiting for decisions only the owner makes.
The shop has one queue everyone can see, the quote log, and four nobody can: the owner's inbox, the owner's notepad, the estimator's pending-information pile, and the portal that gets checked when someone remembers.
Numbers in this document are illustrative. Your assessment reports your shop's actual timings, traced RFQ by RFQ.
Prepared for: a 28-person precision machine shop (illustrative) · Page 4 of 8
The owner-hours map
Hours per week the owner spends inside the quoting path, from a week of interviews and calendar reconstruction.
- Pricing quotes
- 6.0 hours
- Chasing missing information
- 2.5 hours
- Drawing and spec review
- 2.0 hours
- Follow-up calls and emails
- 1.0 hours
- Total
- 11.5 hours
Of the 6.0 pricing hours, roughly 3.5 go to jobs materially similar to work the shop has quoted before. That pricing lives in the owner's head, not in a book anyone else can open. This is the single largest recoverable block of owner time in the building.
Numbers in this document are illustrative. Your assessment reports your shop's actual timings, traced RFQ by RFQ.
Prepared for: a 28-person precision machine shop (illustrative) · Page 5 of 8
What the delay costs
This page is arithmetic, not a forecast. Every input is on the page; change an input and the number moves with it.
- Quotes sent, trailing 12 months
- 76
- Average quote value
- $8,400
- Overall win rate
- 24%
- Quotes that left after day 5
- 31
Assumption: moving those 31 late quotes inside 48 hours lifts their win rate by 5 percentage points. That is deliberately conservative; buyers who hear nothing for a week have usually moved on.
31 quotes × $8,400 × 5 pts = roughly $13,000 a year in awards currently going elsewhere.
Separately: a price book covering repeat-similar work returns about 3.5 owner-hours a week, roughly 175 hours a year, to running the shop.
Numbers in this document are illustrative. Your assessment reports your shop's actual timings, traced RFQ by RFQ.
Prepared for: a 28-person precision machine shop (illustrative) · Page 6 of 8
Findings in full
Intake is invisible. RFQs arrive in three inboxes and the owner's cell phone. Nobody can see the queue, so nobody owns it. Two of the 14 RFQs we traced were found more than three days after they arrived.
Pricing waits for the owner. 68% of quotes needed the owner for at least one number. Half of those needed him only because the last similar job's pricing lives in his head.
Nothing happens after send. 11 of the 14 traced quotes got no follow-up of any kind. Both jobs won during the trace followed a same-day phone call.
No one owns a quote after it leaves. There is no follow-up rule, no owner, no log of outcomes. Of 76 quotes in 12 months, most have no recorded result at all. The shop is not losing these jobs; it is never finding out what happened to them.
Pricing knowledge is one person deep. The owner is the only person who can price 68% of what comes in. Nothing is written down. Every vacation, sick day and busy week becomes quote latency, and one day it becomes a succession problem.
Numbers in this document are illustrative. Your assessment reports your shop's actual timings, traced RFQ by RFQ.
Prepared for: a 28-person precision machine shop (illustrative) · Page 7 of 8
The fix list, in order
Sequenced so each step makes the next one easier. None of them require buying software.
| Fix | What it changes | Cost | Time |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. One owned RFQ inbox with a 24-hour acknowledgement rule | Every RFQ visible in one queue; customers hear back same day | $0 | One afternoon |
| 2. Price book built from the last 40 quotes | Cuts the owner out of repeat-similar pricing | $0 | 2 days, spread over 2 weeks |
| 3. Intake triage rule: standard work vs owner-required | Routes most RFQs around the owner entirely | $0 | Half a day |
| 4. 48-hour follow-up call on every quote | Turns silent quotes into answers | $0 | 30 minutes a week, ongoing |
| 5. Published response promise: 2 working days standard, 5 complex | Customers stop assuming silence means no | $0 | One hour |
Numbers in this document are illustrative. Your assessment reports your shop's actual timings, traced RFQ by RFQ.
Prepared for: a 28-person precision machine shop (illustrative) · Page 8 of 8
Scope, limits, and what happens next
What this assessment did not look at
Pricing accuracy and margin, shop-floor scheduling, ERP data quality, and capacity. If quoting speed is not your constraint, fixing it will not move the business, and page one would have said so.
Three ways forward
Do the fix list yourselves; it was written to be handed to your team. Have us implement it, in which case the $1,500 assessment fee is credited in full against work signed within 30 days. Or do nothing, and keep the document.
Prepared by Las Venus, PlayGlimpse LLC · (650) 737-1515
Numbers in this document are illustrative. Your assessment reports your shop's actual timings, traced RFQ by RFQ.