In fabrication, the first quote often wins

A fabrication job usually starts with a rough floor plan or a phone call. The customer describes what they want built. Then the shop’s senior structural engineer sits down and draws the 2D by hand, sizes the members, and builds the bill of quantities line by line. It is careful, skilled work. It is also slow.

Here is the honest math, using round numbers while we measure the real ones with our client. Say one drawing and BOQ takes a senior engineer half a day. Say the shop gets twenty enquiries a month, and one or two people who can do that work. That is room to price maybe six of the twenty. The other fourteen wait.

In fabrication, a quote that lands while the customer is still deciding tends to win. A quote that lands next week often arrives after someone else has closed the job. So the lost work is not really lost on price. It is lost on speed.

This is the problem the agent is built to take on. It reads the rough plan, drafts the 2D drawing and a priced BOQ, and hands it to the engineer to check and sign off. The engineer stays in charge of every number. The agent does the legwork that was eating the day.

The forecast we will stand behind: if the first pass drops from half a day to under an hour of the engineer’s time, the same team can price all twenty enquiries instead of six. That is roughly three times more quotes out, at the same quality, sent faster. We are not going to put a sales-lift percentage on a slide we have not earned. What we will say is plain: more quotes, sent first, is more jobs you get to win.

We are in discovery with this client now, measuring their real numbers. Nothing is live yet. This is the problem, and this is what we are building to solve it.