When a manufacturer's quotes start taking too long, the usual answer is that estimating needs another person. Sometimes it does. But before you hire, it's worth finding out how much of that time anyone actually spends estimating.
The question matters more right now. ISM reported a Manufacturing PMI of 55.5% for October. New orders came in at 55.5% and production rose to 59.0%, while employment slipped to 52.4%. All three are in expansion, but more manufacturers are reporting rising production than rising headcount. The same teams are being asked to handle more.
A quote that takes eight days rarely takes eight days of work. Most of that time, it's sitting somewhere: in an inbox, waiting for an answer from the customer, waiting on engineering, or waiting for someone to approve a price.
That distinction changes the fix. If the problem is touch time, you may need more estimators or better tools for them. If the problem is wait time, adding an estimator gives you one more person waiting on the same answers.
You don't need new software for this. Take your last 25 or so quotes and find four timestamps for each:
Those four points give you three gaps, and each one points somewhere different:
Some of these timestamps will be hard to find, and that's useful to know too. If you can't tell when a quote became complete, nobody is managing that stage.
Start with intake. The first reply to most quote requests is a list of questions, and the clock stops until the customer answers. Asking for what you need up front, before the request reaches an estimator, removes delay without adding any work for your team.
Then route it. If every request lands in one shared inbox, someone is spending time sorting. Clear rules for product line, size and complexity get work to the right person sooner, and let simple jobs move ahead of complicated ones.
Then capture what people know. Estimators often carry the rules in their heads: which products can really be modified, which customers need what, which jobs tend to go badly. That knowledge is why the experienced person is the bottleneck, and why everything slows down when they're out.
Then look at approvals. If every quote over a modest amount needs a sign-off, ask how often that sign-off changes anything. Thresholds and rules can clear the routine ones.
Once you know which gap is largest, you can choose tools for the actual problem. Commergenix Quote IQ is built for the first one. It reads what the customer wrote, asks them for anything that's missing, and routes the finished request, so estimators start with a complete request instead of an email thread.
If quoting turns out to be one symptom of a wider problem, with requests stalling between departments and teams disagreeing about which information is current, our Organizational Friction Assessment looks at how that work moves across the business.
We've written about how complexity grows faster than revenue. The quote desk is often where you can see that first, because every new product, customer and exception eventually lands there.
Hiring may still be the right call. Just make sure you know what the new person will be waiting for.