Part 2: Streamline The Aerospace Machine Shop Quoting Process For Faster Wins
This is the second post in a three-part series on the bottlenecks I keep running into at high-mix, low-volume aerospace and defense machine shops. Last time, I wrote about the same client’s order-intake process — thirteen people and a chain of checkers doing a job that needed a fraction of that headcount, worth about $1 million a year once we fixed it. This post is about the Kaizen we ran next, on quoting. The lesson here is simple to state and easy to miss: in contract machining, your lead time to quote directly dictates your win rate.
Think about how your customers actually behave. When a buyer needs a part quoted, they’re not sending that RFQ to just you — they’re sending it to two or three vendors at once, and they’re making a sourcing call as soon as a couple of quotes land. If you’re not one of the first ones back, you’re not in the conversation anymore. That’s not a hypothetical — it’s exactly what was happening here, on two fronts.
First: any part this shop could fully control in-house still took too long to quote.
Second, and worse: any part that needed outside vendor input — specialized finishes, heat treating, that kind of thing — turned into a waiting game.
The process was: ask the vendor what it would cost them, wait for their answer, and only then submit a price to the customer.
That chain could run up to fourteen days before the customer heard back — two weeks where a competitor could easily beat them to an answer.
There was a second, quieter problem stacked on top of it. Every quote required entering something like fifty different data points — angles, finishes down to the micro-inch, dimensions, tolerances, all of it — regardless of whether any given field actually moved the price. That’s not rigor. That’s friction dressed up as thoroughness.
During the Kaizen, we mapped the aerospace machine shop quoting process the same way we’d mapped order intake in the last post, current state on the wall, step by step. The before-and-after is stark: a quote used to sit behind a two-week vendor wait and a fifty-field form no matter what the part was. After, most quotes go out the same day. Here’s what actually changed, and it comes down to two moves:
- We stopped waiting on vendors for every quote. I asked a simple question: how much does the vendor’s cost actually change over time? Not much, it turns out, typically within about a twelve-month window. So instead of pausing the whole quote for a vendor callback, we built standing cost baselines the team could use immediately, with a buffer built in for the few items that do move. That’s what took the fourteen-day wait off the board for most of their quotes.
- We stopped over-engineering the intake form. Same exercise we ran on the shop floor: figure out what’s value-added. A small number of the fifty fields drove almost all the price variation. We built correction factors by category for the rest, so an estimator can get very close to an accurate number with a fraction of the typing.
The results, in plain numbers:
- Labor: roughly $200,000 a year in cost avoidance — capacity freed up, not heads cut. Same growing company as last time, so it’s avoided future hiring rather than displaced current staff.
- Revenue: this is the number I actually keep a sharp eye on. During the Kaizen, the plant manager’s own instinct was that every day a quote sits waiting on a vendor callback is a day a competitor can answer first and take the work. We’re tracking win-loss data now to put a real number on it — I’ll come back and update this post once we have it, but directionally, this is where the bigger dollars are probably sitting.
If you run an aerospace machine shop, here’s what I’d check:
- How long is your quote-to-customer cycle, split between work you fully control and work that depends on someone else’s number? Most shops have never actually measured this.
- What data are you collecting on every quote that isn’t actually changing the price?
- Where is a quote sitting in someone else’s queue instead of moving? That’s a handoff, and handoffs are exactly where this kind of bottleneck hides.
Slow quoting doesn’t just cost you labor hours — it quietly erodes market share by handing prospective buyers straight to your competition. If you want help finding out how much that’s costing you, that’s a conversation TBM has all the time.
Next in this blog series: How Fixing an Aerospace Machine Shop Customer Service Process Saved $232,700 a Year
