For manufacturers, quoting accurately and quickly is key to staying competitive. Costimator® – a powerful cost estimating software – can transform your estimating process from guesswork to data-driven precision. But how do you effectively integrate it into your existing workflow without disrupting productivity?
Here’s a step-by-step look at how integrating Costimator into your workflow with a guide for manufacturers and into your quoting process so you can start seeing faster turnaround times, improved accuracy, and better margins.
Step 1: Map Your Current Estimating Process
Before you implement any new tool, take stock of your current quoting and estimating workflow. Who’s involved? Where are the bottlenecks? What systems are currently being used? Understanding this allows you to identify where Costimator will make the biggest impact—whether its time saved on quote creation, consistency across estimators, or replacing tribal knowledge with data.
Step 2: Define Your Integration Goals
What do you want Costimator to do for your team? Whether it’s standardizing pricing, improving win rates, or reducing the time it takes to generate a quote, having clear goals will help you track ROI and measure success. This also ensures everyone on your team understands why you’re making the switch.
Step 3: Customize the Software to Match Your Operation
One of Costimator’s strengths is its flexibility. You can tailor it to match your shop’s specific processes, parts, and pricing structure. Load in your data, including materials, labor rates, machine time, and historical jobs or use our extensive library. The more relevant the inputs, the more accurate your outputs.
Don’t worry you don’t have to go it alone. MTI Systems offers onboarding support to walk you through setup and configuration, ensuring Costimator is built around your shop, not the other way around.
Step 4: Train Your Team
A new tool is only as powerful as the people who use it. Training is essential to get your estimators up to speed. Many companies start with a small pilot group, then expand. Costimator includes robust training resources, and MTI’s team can guide your users through hands-on sessions that reflect your real quoting scenarios.
Step 5: Start Using Costimator Alongside Your Existing Process
Rather than a hard switch, many manufacturers begin by using Costimator in parallel with their existing system. This helps build confidence in the software’s output and gives users a chance to get comfortable. You can compare results, refine estimates, and work out any kinks before going fully live.
Step 6: Monitor, Optimize, Repeat
Once you’re fully integrated, keep the momentum going. Review your metrics – quote accuracy, time-to-quote, win rates, etc. and gather feedback from your team. Costimator evolves with your business, and regular updates to your data libraries and estimating templates ensure continued accuracy and efficiency.
Ready to Replace the Guesswork?
Integrating Costimator isn’t just about software it’s about building a smarter, more scalable quoting process. With over 40 years of manufacturing intelligence behind it, Costimator is built to grow with you.
Schedule a demo to learn more about how to bring data-driven estimating into your shop.
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