by Chris Anjel | Aug 26, 2026 | Uncategorized
Assembly work looks straightforward on paper: you receive parts, put them together, test, and ship. In practice, every subcontractor adds a handoff, a lead time, and a quality gate that can shift the final cost and delivery date. If your quote only covers your...
by Chris Anjel | Aug 26, 2026 | Uncategorized
Most shops treat recurring orders the same way they treat new RFQs: open the file, check the material, verify the process, calculate the time, build the quote, send it, wait for approval. Do that twelve times a year for the same customer and you’ve burned a day...
by Chris Anjel | Aug 26, 2026 | Uncategorized
Material costs shift weekly — sometimes daily. Aluminum, titanium, Inconel, and engineering-grade polymers all move on global supply signals that have nothing to do with your shop floor. Yet most digital manufacturers still quote from a spreadsheet updated last...
by Chris Anjel | Aug 26, 2026 | Uncategorized
You quoted the print time perfectly. The material cost is dialed in. The machine hour rate covers overhead. Then the parts come off the printer or out of the CNC, and your team spends three hours sanding, removing supports, tapping holes, and bead blasting — labor you...
by Chris Anjel | Aug 26, 2026 | Uncategorized
Every shop has been there: a hot RFQ lands, the margin looks great, and the instinct is to say “yes” to the customer’s aggressive timeline. Two weeks later, the job is stuck behind three higher-priority orders, the machine goes down for maintenance,...
by Chris Anjel | Aug 26, 2026 | Uncategorized
Ask ten estimators how they calculate shop rate and you’ll get ten different answers. Some use a single blended hourly number. Others separate machine time from labor time but apply the same overhead multiplier to both. Few actually track them independently from...
