Considerations & Requirements for Your Quote

What do you need to know when requesting a manufacturing quote? Jon and Anthony from Fostermation discuss considerations and requirements for your quote.

TRANSCRIPT: 

John:

You’ve got a part that needs manufactured; you see us on our website; you see something that is similar to what you need. And you’re submitting a request for a quote. There’s a bunch of things that can speed up the process.

Anthony: 

The easiest thing is drawing submission. With us being a custom manufacturer, we need to see all specs including material grade, tolerances, any type of internal engineering specs that might be required. There’s plating specs. What those specs are– So the print should have a lot of that information on it, and if it doesn’t, myself or John or another team member will definitely follow up requesting additional information. Of course, we want to make sure we’re producing exactly to your requirements and what you’re looking for [in] the end product. All those things that I mentioned are definitely key factors. 

John:

The big thing, too, with a print is also your volume. And then if you have a certain lead time requested, it helps out a lot, but the biggest thing is if you need a P-PAP, or an IMDS, or something like that, that is needed to complete this quote, have it at hand. We’ve got burnt several times with people; we submit a quote and then later they want an order and then they’re requesting the kinds of things but it’s like, “well you didn’t order, we didn’t submit this.” There are a lot of additional charges for that kind of stuff. If you can have all that upfront, and then we can turn around. He’s awesome at getting quotes turned around and sent out. It used to be a long process; he’s got it down to a T and everything I see, he always asks these additional questions. He’s right upfront with them. Instead of guessing, just ask. We can get these quotes turned around a lot faster. 

Anthony:

With your quotes, too, besides the information that’s required, definitely keep in mind what your budgets are. If you do have required target pricing, required–

John:

That’s huge because that saves a lot of time.

Anthony:

–If you can give us any type of information like that, that’s definitely appreciated because our fit might not be what we do in our manufacturing process, we might not have the equipment or the process that might be the best fit for that part, and we will be more than happy to tell you that upfront.

John: 

And we will always try to suggest somebody that we like to work with people locally so if there’s something that we can’t do, it’s not in our wheelhouse, all right, here you go. 

Anthony:

Yeah, somebody with better capability, that would be more cost-effective, we’ll definitely point you in the right direction as well. 

John:

And also, if you have tighter prices, that’s huge, because we can say that this part, we’re getting a hundred thousand pieces at eight cents apart. All right, you’re getting that from China. No, we’re not even getting close to that. So we can easily look if you give us a requested lead time and a target pricing, we won’t waste your time if that’s something we know we can’t compete with. And like I said, maybe some people have multi-spindles; we don’t have multi-spindles. So they’re dropping off parts every 3 to 4 seconds and that same part might take us 30 seconds. So if that’s upfront, then cool, share with us. I’m not going to lie to you, I’m sorry, I wish I could get this to work, but we’re not going to waste your time. 

Anthony:

Our capabilities just aren’t set up for it.