The quoting and works order system that runs your job shop

One drawing, one estimator, and a price by four o'clock.

A typical business running one of these has 15 to 60 staff in one unit on an industrial estate, machines or fabricates to other people's drawings, and sends out somewhere between 20 and 80 quotes a week. Whether the quoting lives in a workbook started in 2005 or on a browser screen built in 2019, the job is the same.

In the estimator's words, it takes the drawing and the enquiry, builds the quote a line at a time (material at the last price paid, each operation with a setup and a run time, plating or heat treatment at the subcontractor's price, a margin on top) and prints it with the quantity breaks across the bottom. When the order arrives, the quote becomes a works order, the job card prints with the route on it, operators book time against it, and the job is costed when it ships, quoted against actual. It knows what was quoted. It does not know what was lost, or why.

The rules it holds are the ones a new estimator gets wrong:

• Setup is charged once per batch, but if the same part is ordered again within six months the second setup is quoted at half.
• Material is quoted at the last price paid plus a percentage, except for the two customers who supply their own.
• Every machine has its own hourly rate, and three customers have a negotiated rate that overrides all of them.
• A repeat job takes its route and times from the last works order, unless the drawing revision has changed.
• The quantity breaks are always 1, 5, 10 and 50 off, because that is what the biggest customer asks for.

Almost none of that is written down anywhere else.

The quoting started as an Excel workbook, built around 2005 by the owner or the first estimator, with the hourly rates, the material prices and the margin in cells on the last sheet. Works orders came later: a Microsoft Access database for the job card, the route and the time bookings, or a small .NET Framework Windows program a contractor wrote around 2013 to take over the Access forms. The workbook lives on the estimator's PC, the program is installed on each office PC from a folder on the server, and the Access data sits on a server that was in the unit when the shop moved in.

The contractor has moved on, and the zip of source left on the server may or may not match what runs. The workbook's formulas make sense to one estimator. The quote number is still typed into both, and the program has gone years without a change, because nobody left in the unit knows which screen feeds which table.

The same quoting and works orders built between 2016 and 2022, usually by a small agency or a freelancer as a web system in PHP or .NET Core, or put together on Power Apps by the estimator who followed the one with the workbook. The estimator prices a drawing in a browser, the accepted quote raises the works order with a button, the operators book time on a tablet by the machine through an Ionic app, and the owner has a margin page. From the office it looked as though the workbook had finally gone.

The trouble starts at the quantity breaks. They were built as four fixed columns, 1, 5, 10 and 50 off, so a customer who asks for 25 off gets a second quote typed by hand, and the one attempt at a fifth column stopped the lead times printing. The agency has since been bought by a larger firm with no appetite for work this size, and the tablet app will not install on a new tablet.

From 2023 some estimators tried again with an AI app builder and stalled where a won quote has to become a works order. Browser or not, the price and the job sit in two places again, on a system as stuck as the workbook it was meant to retire.

A quote out the same day, and a job that is costed when it ships.

The quoting side is why one estimator can price forty enquiries a week and still walk the floor. Rates, material and margin are already in it, so a quote for a bracket nobody has made before takes twenty minutes and a repeat takes five. Two estimators quoting the same drawing get the same number.

The works order side turns a price into a job the shop can run. The job card goes to the floor with the route on it, the time comes back against it, and when the job ships the owner can see whether the quote was right. Over a few years that becomes the shop's best asset: a history of what every part took, on which machine, by whom.

Nothing in a system like this breaks. The gaps around it widen.

The quote and the job live in two places. The estimator quotes in the workbook and the office retypes the winning ones into the works order system. When the drawing revision changes between the two, the job card carries the old one, and the shop finds out at inspection.

The rates are whatever was last typed in. In either generation, hourly rates and material prices sit in cells or on a settings screen nobody reviews, and the margin has not moved since it was set. Material-heavy jobs go out under-priced and the small ones carry them, and the year-end accounts are the first place anyone sees it.

The program is where the contractor left it. The server under the works order program runs Windows Server 2012, which ended in October 2023. Whoever patches the server leaves the program well alone, and the customer's supplier questionnaire now asks about both.

The big customers want it in their portal. Enquiries arrive through a supplier portal with a deadline on them, and the quote has to go back the same way, a price and a lead time per line and per quantity break. The system makes a PDF, so the estimator types every number twice.

One record from the enquiry to the invoice, with rates the owner can see.

Each of these builds on something the quoting and works order side already does.

The quote becomes the works order. The estimator's screen writes into the same database the job card prints from, so the drawing revision, the route and the times on the quote are the ones the shop makes to. Nothing is retyped.

Rates with a date on them. Hourly rates, material prices and the margin on a screen the owner owns, each showing when it last changed, with the material price offered from the last price paid.

Margin by customer, without waiting for year end. The job costing the system already does per job, rolled up by customer, by part and by machine, on a page the owner reads on a Friday. The next quote to that customer starts from what the last ten jobs cost, on purpose rather than from memory.

Won, lost, and why. Every quote gets an outcome and a reason, so the hit rate by customer and by part type is a number rather than a feeling.

Quotes the portal accepts. The same quote produced as the PDF on the letterhead and as the file the customer's portal takes, price and lead time per line and per quantity break, from one screen.

The workbook, or the old quote screen, stays open through all of this. The new pieces are added beside it, and the estimator closes it when the new screen is better.

In the enquiry packs keyed in by hand, and in the times nobody checks against the last job.

AI reads and checks here, and the pricing stays with the estimator:

The enquiry pack, read into the quote. The enquiry arrives as an email with the drawings and the customer's spreadsheet of part numbers, revisions and quantities, and the estimator keys a line per part before pricing anything. AI reads the pack and drafts the header and the lines for the estimator to check, so the time goes on the operations. For a shop sending 40 quotes a week, at five to ten minutes of keying a pack, that is typically three to six hours a week back for the estimator.

Times checked against what the floor booked. Before a quote goes out, AI sets its setup and run times beside the actuals on the last few jobs for the same part and flags the lines well outside them. Repeat parts make up much of a job shop's quoting, and each meant pulling old job cards, so the estimator typically saves an hour or two a week and catches times that have drifted.

Subcontract prices read from the reply. The plater's or heat treater's price comes back as an email or a PDF and gets typed onto the operation line. AI reads the price and the lead time onto the line for the estimator to confirm. At a couple of minutes a reply, across 20 to 80 quotes a week, that is usually an hour or so a week for whoever chases them.

Not worth doing: pricing a new part from the drawing alone. An estimator who has stood at the machine beats any model on a part nobody has made before.

A drafted quote line needs a quote record to land in, and a workbook on one PC is not one, so this waits for the quoting screen and the stable program under it. The assessment maps where it would pay back on the quoting as it stands.

Stabilise the program first, then give the estimator one screen, then everything else.

1. Stabilise. The source for the works order program found, or recovered from the running program where the zip does not match, the data moved off the Windows Server 2012 machine onto a supported database, and a test copy so a change can be tried without touching the job cards. This goes first because until it is done, nothing about the program can be changed safely.
2. The quoting screen. The first new piece is the one the estimator feels: the workbook's logic on a screen in a browser that writes the quote into the same database the works orders come from. The workbook stays open beside it, and for a few weeks both produce the same number, which is the test.
3. Rates, outcomes and the portal file. The rate table with dates, won and lost on every quote, and the portal upload. Each a stage on its own, each priced on its own.
4. Margin by customer and the enquiry reader. The costing roll-up and the AI that reads the enquiry pack, once there are enough quotes in one place to read against.
5. Retire the workbook and the old program when nothing is typed into either. The last thing to go is usually the quote print on the letterhead, because the owner likes how it looks.

The assessment is from £395 + VAT, sized on a free one-hour consultation, with an exact price before you commit. For a quoting system that means a few days with the estimator, the workbook and the works order program, finding where the rates and the rules live and what the portal customers need, and a report with costed options and a fixed price for each. Each stage after that is priced before you commit to it. How we work, what drives the price and the payment terms each have a page, and so does each technology the system is built on: Excel, Microsoft Access and .NET Framework, and for the newer generation old PHP, .NET Core and Ionic.