Quoting Consignment Material Jobs Accurately

Customer-supplied material jobs sound like easy margin — no material cost, no procurement lead time, no inventory risk. But experienced estimators know these jobs often hide the highest risk per hour of shop time. When the material shows up wrong, damaged, or insufficient, your schedule and margin take the hit.

Quoting consignment work accurately means pricing the verification, liability, and handling that come with someone else’s material. Here’s how to build quotes that protect you.

Verify Before You Quote

Never quote a consignment job based on the customer’s material cert or verbal description alone. Build a receiving inspection step into every quote. This includes:

• Dimensional check of stock (bar, plate, sheet, filament spool weight)
• Material certification review — heat lot, mill cert, grade confirmation
• Visual inspection for damage, corrosion, or contamination
• Traceability documentation capture

Price this inspection time explicitly. A 30-minute receiving check on a $5,000 job is cheap insurance. If the customer objects, that’s a signal.

Define Liability Boundaries in Writing

Your quote (and the subsequent work order) must state exactly what happens if:

• Material fails inspection after rough machining starts
• Stock is undersized for the final part geometry
• Customer-supplied material damages your tooling or workholding
• Heat treatment or finishing reveals material defects

Standard terms: customer replaces material at their cost; rework and lost machine time are billable at shop rate; schedule slips are not your liability. Put this in the quote notes and require acknowledgment before scheduling.

Charge for Handling and Storage

Consignment material occupies rack space, requires tracking, and often needs special handling (heavy plate, hygroscopic filament, certified traceable stock). Your quote should include:

• Receiving and put-away labor
• Daily/weekly storage fee after a defined grace period (e.g., 5 business days)
• Return shipping cost for remnants or rejected material
• Inventory system tracking time

Even a nominal $25/day storage fee changes customer behavior — they’ll schedule pickup faster, freeing your floor space.

Build a Material Shortage Buffer

Customers consistently under-ship consignment stock. They’ll send 10 bars for a 12-part run “because the other two are coming next week.” Quote for the full job quantity upfront, with a line item: “Additional setup/run charges apply if material received in partial shipments.” This prevents the death-by-a-thousand-setups scenario where you set up three times for one PO.

Version Control the Material Spec

Just like part drawings, material specs change. The quote must reference a specific revision: “Per customer PO #4421, material cert revision B, heat lot #A7732.” If the next release ships revision C material, that’s a new quote — not a free revision. This prevents the classic “but it’s the same part number” argument when the new alloy machines differently.

Account for Unknown Machinability

Even with a cert, you don’t know how that specific heat lot machines until you cut it. Add a contingencies line: “First-article machining time may vary ±15% based on actual material behavior; final billing at actual time.” This is standard in aerospace and medical — your automotive and industrial customers should accept it too.

Use Your Quoting System to Enforce Discipline

Consignment jobs expose the gaps in ad-hoc quoting: missing inspection steps, vague liability terms, no storage charges, no version control. A purpose-built quoting engine lets you build consignment templates with these line items pre-loaded, required fields enforced, and version tracking automatic. Solvi helps digital manufacturers standardize these high-risk quotes so nothing slips through — and every consignment job runs at the margin you planned.

Next time a customer says “I’ll send the material,” send them a quote that says “Here’s exactly how we’ll handle it.” Your floor will thank you.