by Chris Anjel | Jul 13, 2026 | Capacity & Growth, Quoting & Estimating
You just closed a week where the RFQ queue never seemed to empty. Estimators worked late, spreadsheets multiplied, and the inbox kept pinging. Now the dust is settling. Most shops exhale and move on. The smart ones pause and ask: what did that chaos just tell us about...
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 | Capacity & Growth, Shop Operations
Ask a shop owner what drives profitability and you’ll usually hear about material costs, labor rates, or win rates. Those matter. But there’s a quieter lever that often has a bigger impact on the bottom line: capacity utilization — how much of your...
by Chris Anjel | Jul 13, 2026 | Materials & Pricing, Quoting & Estimating
Most digital manufacturing shops don’t lose quotes because their work is bad. They lose them because their quoting is slow, inconsistent, or disconnected from how the shop actually runs. An RFQ lands in an inbox, waits for an estimator, and by the time a price...
