This post was co-authored by Tom R, General Manager at a Precision Manufacturing Company.
In the world of precision machining, the difference between profit and a loss often comes down to revision control. For Tom R., the General Manager of a mid-size CNC facility serving the aerospace and medical sectors, the shop floor was dialed in—5-axis mills running optimized tool paths, operators hitting tight tolerances—but the front office was bleeding efficiency. The quoting process hadn’t evolved much beyond a chaotic mix of disconnected spreadsheets and manual entry into their ERP system.
Together, they built a solution that mirrored the shop’s actual workflow. They moved away from the fragile ecosystem of “version 1_final_v2.xlsx” spreadsheets to a unified engine that synced directly with JobBOSS. The focus was on building a single source of truth where a revision to a print automatically updated the labor and material requirements downstream. It wasn’t about imposing new tools; it was about automating the logic Tom’s team already used, ensuring that if a material price spiked, the margin analysis caught it immediately.
The impact of stabilizing this workflow was profound. The turnaround time for complex RFQs dropped from a sluggish two weeks to just two days. By removing the friction of manual data entry and the fear of versioning errors, the estimating team could respond to customers while the competition was still opening the file. The shop saw a 23% improvement in margins—not by raising prices, but by eliminating the calculation errors that used to slip through unnoticed.
