Chapter 04
Team view: Same system, three jobs, on an ordinary Monday.
The estimator opens a draft costing with candidate comparables, current inputs and source links instead of a blank sheet and a search box.
Illustrative
An example firm built from firms like yours, for demonstration only. Not a client. We model the inputs and the queue examples, then derive every total from the assumptions shown. A real audit measures each workflow in your operation.
- Profile
- Industrial manufacturer
- Revenue
- €22M
- People
- 90
- Sites
- 2
What they see
Estimator
Prices the work
Opens a sourced draft with candidate comparables and current inputs. Confirms lot size, routing, setup and cycle time, tooling, yield, subcontract work, capacity and overhead before pricing risk and margin.
- 5
- Qualified RFQs priced this week
- 16
- RFQ preparation hours carried this week
- 4
- Exception queues
Commercial lead
Decides what to bid
Sees every qualified RFQ, its sourced sales value, bid/no-bid status and which response windows are about to close.
Owner
Watches the pipeline
Tenders in, tenders answered, tenders won, and the ones nobody got to. That last number used to be invisible.
What still needs a person
The system does not decide these. It gathers everything the decision needs, then waits.
-
Tolerance outside the usual
needs you todayThe current drawing revision asks for tighter than the approved process holds. Costing stops here and goes to Engineering to say whether we can hold it.
RFQ value · €142,000
-
Lead time we cannot promise
needs you todayThe supplier quotes material at eleven weeks. The tender wants eight. Someone decides whether to bid it.
RFQ value · €61,500
-
Material price moved
this weekThe comparable job used a price that is three months old and no longer holds.
RFQ value · €28,900
-
Certificate not on file
needs you todayThe controlled Quality library holds no current approved certificate. The response waits for Quality to verify it.
Approval required
This does not remove anyone
The hours the system could take on are the retyping, the chasing and the looking-up. Your team keeps the part of the job that needed a person: the judgment, the exceptions and the customers. If a build would take somebody's job instead of the dull half of it, we say so before it starts.