How to Quote Rush Orders Profitably

Rush orders are a fact of life in digital manufacturing. A customer needs parts yesterday, and they’re willing to pay a premium — but only if you can deliver without blowing your schedule or your margins.The challenge isn’t saying yes. It’s pricing...

How to Quote Customer-Furnished Material

Customer-furnished material (CFM) sounds like a win: the client buys the stock, you just run the job. In practice, CFM introduces inspection burden, liability exposure, scheduling uncertainty, and hidden labor that can erase margin if you don’t account for them...

Quoting Serial Production Runs

Most digital manufacturers start with one-off prototypes and low-volume orders. Quoting those is straightforward: material, machine time, labor, markup. But when a customer asks for 500 units per month for a year, the math changes entirely. Serial production runs...

Quoting Post-Processing Time Accurately

Most shops have a good handle on machine time. They know their hourly rates, their cycle times, and how to amortize equipment costs across a build. What trips them up is everything that happens after the part comes off the machine.Support removal, heat treatment,...

Quoting Legacy Parts Without Drawings

Every shop gets the call: a customer needs a replacement part for equipment built twenty years ago. The original drawings are lost, the OEM is gone, and all they have is a worn-out sample sitting on a pallet. For digital manufacturers, these legacy part requests are...