Manufacturing Estimating & Quoting Software

MTI Systems' Costimator Software Doubles Precision Machine Fabrications' Quoting Throughput

The Client

Precision Machine FabricationPrecision Machine Fabrication started manufacturing in 1978 with two employees working from a 1,000 square foot building. Over the past 30 years they have grown into a 100,000 square foot facility and employ around 70 people. They have expanded their manufacturing facility in order to meet the ever-changing needs and requirements of their traditional client base and the company remains loyal to their roots by continuing to focus on personal service and outstanding quality.

As a contract manufacturer based in Raleigh North Carolina, they specializes in close tolerance sheet metal fabrication. Their teams work with their customers' design to produce custom parts to fit their customer's specific needs. They manufacture products for industries such as electronic telecommunications and robotics where they make parts including small brackets to large sheet metal cabinets.

Precision Machine Fabrication was searching to replace their one-person estimating department with a consistent estimating method. This consistency could help multiple estimators work together seamlessly and efficiently estimate.

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The Problem

The manufacturer was limited to only one person manually estimating prior to implementing the Costimator® cost estimating software. Their manual method was extremely time consuming and laborious. Since it took so long to return quotes, the manufacturer lost opportunities to their competitors. Precision Machine Fabrication needed to change their estimating method in order to produce consistent estimates and quotes quickly, something they seriously lacked when relying on one estimator estimating and quoting manually.

It was crucial for Precision Machine Fabrication to find a faster, easier, and more consistently accurate estimating solution that would help them to get more quotes out the door in far less time.

How Costimator Helped

Costimator provided Precision Machine Fabrication with a cost estimating system that was easy to learn and comes with manufacturing data and cost models that helped the company be more consistent in their estimates and quotes. The company's lead estimator, Doug McDonald, notes that when he first saw Costimator in 2005, "It had everything I wanted (what I had been programming in Access) it to do. At first glance, I thought, wow, this would take me 10 more years to develop what Costimator already has in it now". 

McDonald also states that, looking back, when he was shopping for cost estimating and quoting software and compared Costimator to other solutions, he realized that "Costimator just seemed to blow everyone else out of the water". He added that MTI Systems' cost estimating software has features that no other estimating or quoting software has, including "a database that we could build and select operations on and just build up quoting modules from".

In addition to all of the time-reducing and consistency enhancing features that the cost estimating software offers manufacturers, for Precision Machine Fabrication, the ability to maintain consistency with multiple estimators has increased their throughput of quotes by 50%.

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About MTI Systems, Inc.

Established in 1982, MTI Systems is a leading provider of cost estimating software solutions for the manufacturing industry, serving over 2,000 suppliers, OEMs and engineering firms worldwide. The company is headquartered at 1111 Elm Street, Suite 6, West Springfield, MA 01089.

MTI Systems
  • Costimator Manufacuring Software

  • Estimating for Machining and Parts

  • Costing and Quoting for Fabrication

  • Cost Estimating and Quoting Software

"Costimator has been a very large part of Jabil's quoting process since being purchased in 2003. It is currently being utilized in the Americas to respond quickly to request for quotes, to provide target pricing to suppliers and validate quotes received from the supply base. Ultimately, this tool will be utilized globally allowing us to estimate accurately and rapidly within each region."

- Kristen Housley, Cost Estimator, Jabil Circuits

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