April 10, 2025
The Forgotten Bottleneck in the Metal Industry: How the Quoting Process Holds Back Growth
This article highlights how inefficient quoting processes, often overlooked, create hidden bottlenecks that limit growth, profitability, and operational flow in metalworking companies
Many metal companies invest heavily in their machines and processes, sometimes even in ERP systems. Yet, operational pressure remains high, and profitability continues to be under strain.
In practice, we often find that the problem rarely lies in the production itself. It’s more often in what comes before production.
🧩 What we frequently see
In small to mid-sized manufacturing companies (10–250 employees), we see recurring patterns:
Quotes are created in Excel
Product configurations are rebuilt from scratch every time
Cost prices are not always up-to-date or complete
Delivery reliability is hard to estimate
Planning, capacity, and inventory are not visible in real-time
Departments use different tools
Each of these is understandable in isolation—but together, they create an invisible bottleneck that slows everything down.
📉 Why your quoting process has more impact than you think
Quoting often seems like a purely administrative task. But it determines:
How fast you can respond to a request
How reliable your pricing and delivery times are
How well your planning aligns with reality
How much risk you run of errors, rush jobs, and downtime
And when quotes are slow or inaccurate, it also means:
Extra, unnecessary coordination
Potential lost revenue
Incorrect quotes and margin loss
Stress and less control on the shop floor
🔄 Where things typically go wrong
We consistently see three common breaking points:
Configuration & costing are disconnected from the system
→ Too much knowledge lives in people’s heads, spreadsheets, or non-integrated tools.Production and planning are looped in too late
→ The quote comes in, but doesn’t match available capacity or stock.There’s no central workflow
→ Departments optimize their own tasks, but not the entire process.
🧱 The building blocks for a strong end-to-end process from request to quote, production to invoicing, and procurement to stock optimization
What works is an integrated approach where:
Quotes are automatically linked to BOMs, inventory, and capacity
Configuration and costing happen in one system
Production planning has real-time visibility into materials, schedules, and availability
Information doesn’t disappear into isolated tools but is available centrally
This isn’t a plea for a massive ERP overhaul—but for a process-driven approach supported by technology that adapts with you.
🤔 It really can be different
Imagine being able to respond to a request in just one minute, with all calculations and documents automatically included.
Accurate, error-free, and based on real-time inventory, procurement, production capacity, and planning.
