A quoting system audit for custom manufacturers

Who it is for

The person who owns quoting without doing it. A VP of sales who signs quotes built by a process he cannot see inside. A CIO who has been told to fix quoting across plants and has only been shown configurator demos. An owner whose senior estimator is five years from retirement and whose costing workbook nobody else can operate. A CFO who reads the fixed price risk factor in the annual report and wants to know what sits behind it.

It is for companies whose quotes start from a document somebody else wrote: a bid package, a specification, a drawing set describing a thing that has not been built yet. If your quotes start from a catalogue and a list of options, you do not need this; you need a configurator, and we will say so on the first call.

What we do, in order

1. Mutual NDA, then the archive. Twenty to fifty recent quotes, each with the customer package that triggered it and the costing workbook behind it. Nothing moves before the NDA is signed. Files we do not need are not opened.
2. The quote genealogy. We take three typical quotes and trace every number to its source: a rate table, a supplier quote, a formula, a previous job, or a person’s judgement. The output is the share of your price that traces to something written down, per quote, and a list of every number that traces to a head.
3. The two estimator test. One live or recent package, two of your estimators, independently, a day each. We compare the totals and then the assumption lists. The spread is your quoting variance and the assumption differences are the decisions your process makes silently. Results are reported without names.
4. The rule capture ratio. Every pricing rule the estimators use, from the genealogy and from interviews, tested against the admission bar we use when mining an archive for an engine: stated mechanism, fits at least three past jobs, survives with any one job removed. Rules that pass go into a written pricing identity. Rules that fail are recorded as judgement, with a question to the estimator and a bracket on the answer.
5. The single point of failure register. People, files and the formulas inside the files. For each, who else can operate it today, what happens next month if that person is unavailable, and what happens in three years. We read the formulas, not the printed values, because the values hide what the formulas do.
6. The feedback check. Ten won jobs: quoted cost beside actual cost from your ERP. If the join takes more than a day we say the loop does not exist and show what it would take to build one. If it exists we show the spread and whether anyone has ever acted on it.
7. The written answer. Keep, buy, build or combine, with reasons, and the roadmap for whichever it is.

What you get

• A written pricing identity. The rules your company actually prices by, in one document a new hire could read, with each rule’s mechanism and the jobs it was verified against. For most companies this document has never existed.
• A quoting risk register. The single points of failure, the silent scope decisions and the unwritten margin logic, each with what it would cost you and what closes it.
• Your variance, measured. The two estimator spread, reported as a number you can track quarterly.
• A question list for your estimators. Everything that failed the admission bar, framed as questions with brackets, which is the honest form of judgement and the raw material for the next rule.
• The lane, and the recommendation. Keep the spreadsheets with the rules now written; buy a configurator because the products are more standard than believed; build a quoting engine on the archive we have just mapped; or combine, which for a group is the usual honest answer.

What it costs

We price the audit after the first call, once we have seen the size of the archive and how many plants and estimators are involved. A fixed price quoted before seeing the work would be a guess, and this whole exercise is about taking guesses out of pricing. The first call costs nothing and usually settles whether an audit is worth doing at all; we have told companies by email, before any call, that they were in the wrong lane for us.

What happens afterwards

Three outcomes, and we give the first two when they are true.

Keep. Your volume is low, your rules are now written, one owner can run the workbook and a backup can too. You leave with the pricing identity and the register and you owe us nothing further.

Buy. Your products are more standard than the company believed, the quote starts from options rather than from a document, and a configurator will do the job. We have written a buyer’s guide that says this against our own interest and we will say it again in person.

Build, or combine. Your quotes start from hundreds of pages somebody else wrote, the reading is where the money is decided, and the rules can now be written because the audit wrote them. This is what Mavlon builds: an engine that reads the whole package, cites every requirement to its page, puts the contradictions in front of a person and prices in your own logic. It is tested blind against filed quotes it has never seen, with the pass bar written down in advance, under the protocol we publish. The audit is the first two weeks of that build, which is why we start there rather than with a demo.