by Chris Anjel | Jul 13, 2026 | Materials & Pricing, Quoting & Estimating
Reorders are the closest thing to free money in digital manufacturing. The customer already knows your quality. The process is proven. The material is on the shelf. Yet too many shops treat every reorder like a brand-new RFQ — digging through emails, hunting for old...
by Chris Anjel | Jul 13, 2026 | Materials & Pricing, Quoting & Estimating
Most digital manufacturers still handle RFQs the same way they did a decade ago: a customer emails a STEP file and a drawing, someone on your team opens it, runs a manual takeoff, applies a pricing spreadsheet, and emails back a PDF. The cycle takes hours or days....
by Chris Anjel | Jul 13, 2026 | Materials & Pricing, Quoting & Estimating
Every shop owner knows the moment: material costs climb, labor gets tighter, and the margins that used to feel comfortable start to shrink. You need to raise prices. The question is how to do it without watching your best customers walk to a competitor.The...
by Chris Anjel | Jul 13, 2026 | Materials & Pricing, Quoting & Estimating
You open an RFQ, spend 45 minutes analyzing wall thicknesses, draft angles, and tolerances, then send a quote — only to hear nothing back. Or worse, the buyer asks why there is a $150 “engineering review” line item they never expected. Why the Conversation...
by Chris Anjel | Jul 13, 2026 | Materials & Pricing, Quoting & Estimating
Laser cutting quotes live or die on three numbers: how tightly parts nest on a sheet, the usable material yield that nesting produces, and the actual machine run time required to cut the job. Get one of them wrong and you either lose the order or lose margin on the...
by Chris Anjel | Jul 13, 2026 | Materials & Pricing, Quoting & Estimating
Injection molding shops know the drill: a new RFQ lands, and the quoting process splits into two tracks. One estimator tackles the mold tooling — cavities, steel selection, surface finish, expected life. Another calculates the piece-part price — cycle time, material...
