Every manufacturer who automates quoting expects to get time back. What catches them off guard is what changes on the shop floor.
Where the time actually goes
When quoting is manual, engineering is the bottleneck — not because engineers are slow, but because they're the only ones who can answer product questions. Once product logic lives in the configurator, anyone with a login can quote accurately. Sales stops interrupting engineering. Engineering starts designing again.
The headline numbers from six manufacturers
- Quote turnaround: 2 weeks → 2 hours (median)
- Engineer interruptions: down 70–85%
- Win rate on RFQs: up 12 points on average
- First-week production rework: near zero
The second shift nobody plans for
Production files stop surprising the floor. BOMs arrive formatted, dimensions match the drawings, and the week-one production chaos that teams used to budget for just disappears.
The first week live, we processed 40 orders that would have taken a month to quote manually. The floor thought we'd hired three new people.
What to do in the first 30 days
- Audit your top 20 SKUs and the rules that actually drive pricing.
- Model
constraintsbeforeoptions— constraints are where real engineering lives. - Give distributors access to the configurator before internal sales. They'll find edge cases faster than anyone.
- Measure time-to-first-valid-quote, not quote volume.
Want to sanity-check the ROI for your own setup? Try our ROI calculator — it uses the same inputs we used for the benchmark cohort.
