Quoting
Worth Noting
A new job-quoting
system allows
Plainfield Companies
to leverage its diverse
capabilities—from
stamping to molding
to multislide forming
—and improve
tracking. Time saved
coupled with
accuracy mean better
odds of landing
profitable work.
BY LOUIS A. KREN, SENIOR EDITOR
uoting is a tricky business. Sometimes it is no business at all,
depending on the intentions of the
potential customer. You seem to spin
your wheels, spending time, manpower
and brains to crunch numbers and
schedules. If you could get into the
minds of the RFQers, things would be
much simpler. You’d know if you are
bidding against yourself, if you’re just
supplying numbers that the RFQer can
take to its customer or if this job actually will see the light of day.
But if even five percent of quotes turn
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METALFORMING / SEPTEMBER 2005
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into profitable work, the quoting process
succeeds and is worth all of the false starts.
With the success rate so tilted against
you, quoting must be quick and accurate.
So how do you get the most bang for
your quoting buck? One Illinois-based
company, proficient in stamping, tool
build, molding, multislide forming and
more, thinks it has found the answer.
The Plainfield Companies, Plainfield, IL, is a privately owned business
with stamping and molding operations
in Plainfield, a stamping facility in
Texas, and a metalformer with multislide expertise in Wisconsin. With the
ability to produce parts via a variety of
processes and material types and assemble them into components for automotive, electronic and medical customers, Plainfield Companies protects
itself from the inevitable downcycles
that can hit each of these industries at
any one time. But that protection also
stresses the firm’s quoting process.
Tracking all of this expertise and merging all of these capabilities and cost
structures—as well as secondary work
such as heattreating and plating—into
quotes for complex multiprocess jobs
can be trying.
Seeking to streamline quoting—the
company produces some 400 quotes
per month—and better communicate its
diverse capabilities to potential customers,
Plainfield recently implemented
DieQuote, a new quoting system from
Cimatron Technologies, Inc., Novi, MI.
It combines technology from Rockwell
Technology Group’s (Grand Rapids,
MI) RapidQuote software, Forming
Technologies Inc.’s (Oakville, Ontario,
Canada) analysis software and Cimatron’s Quick Concept software. Cimatron is the exclusive distributor of
DieQuote in North America.
Out with the Old
Plainfield made the foray into new
quoting technology driven by the need
for quoting stamping and molding jobs,
often under the same quote. The company’s existing system had been developed in the early 1990s and was showing its age.
“It was time to upgrade,” says Mike
www.metalformingmagazine.com
Making use of a built-in materials database, the blank-development portion of the
quoting software in use at Plainfield Companies calculates initial blank shapes,
offers graphical display of material thinning, performs initial product and process
feasibility, and exports the developed blank to CAD systems.
Eck, new business development manager at Plainfield Companies “With our
multiple-company setup and with the
multiple processes we offer, the old system couldn’t adapt. This new quoting
system allows us to add any number of
processes and companies. And being
Windows-based, we can cut and paste
anywhere in the quote documents and
have more flexibility in working with it.
For example, its Windows format allows
us to dump information right into a
database for tracking or to give our
salespeople a heads up. We couldn’t do
that before.”
The new quoting system went online
at Plainfield in April 2004, and the company’s estimators switched to it fulltime in April 2005, undertaking a gradual shift to better understand the
system’s capabilities and phase out the
old quoting setup.
After the estimating team—three
full-time and two part-time estimators,
all working out of the company’s headquarters—underwent inhouse training,
Eck worked with them to impart expertise he had gained in working with the
system programmer during install.
“In one day we were completing
quotes,” he recalls.
Difficulties with the old quoting sys-
tem included the inability to accurately track quote revisions and incorporate
Plainfield’s myriad processes and locations, and its lack of user-friendly attributes. All of that contributed to challenges in delivering timely and accurate
quotes.
In with the New
The customized system uses the
DieQuote platform as a backbone, based
on Plainfield Companies’ methodology
and cost factors. It essentially automates and standardizes the quoting system, according to its makers, and is
designed around the user’s unique flow
and disciplines.
The system can support Plainfield
Companies’ entire quote-generation
process. That includes importing of
part data and splitting of the part; determining mass properties such as weight,
volume and surface area; selecting
processes and work locations, determining job-run length; identifying
needed quality-control processes and
packaging options—all with the goal
of delivering an accurate and timely
quote. Also, all quote-related data store
in a database, allowing users to search
for past quotes produced in similar situations, track successful versus unsucMETALFORMING / SEPTEMBER 2005
25
Quoting Worth Noting
cessful quotes and conduct win-loss
analyses. In addition, quote data can
link to accounting or ERP software to
reduce redundant data entry and
streamline processes.
Tailored to Plainfield’s
Unique Needs
Under the Plainfield banner are three
stamping operations: El Paso, TX, dealing primarily with progressive-die work;
Plainfield, IL, a similar operation that
takes on compound dies and larger progressive dies; and Sturgeon Bay, WI,
acquired in 2004 and focused on multislide work and spinforming. Plasticmolding work occurs at the headquarters’ location.
“For us to provide the best quote, we
needed a program that can switch facilities to find the right fit for that job,” Eck
says. “When we switch facilities, we also
switch machine-cost rates because each
location has different overhead costs
and other costs unique to that location.”
The software features a host of dropdown menus populated with rates,
processes and other items, all tailored to
Plainfield’s specific operations and cost
structure. Access levels vary—for example, only top company management
can change machine rates, and only
certain personnel can access some fields
within the program. But the estimating
team can access data across all four
locations, encompassing all of the company’s processes.
“Some estimators do molding and
some do stamping,” explains Eck.
“When a quote requires a stamping and
an insert-molding process, those estimators can work back and forth to
develop a quote.”
Multi-Process Quoting
One of Many Plusses
Discussing the software’s capability
in handling multiprocess quotes, Eck
offers a stamp-plate-stamp job as an
example.
“In assembling a quote, we may
determine that we have to stamp the
parts, send them out for plating, take
them back for further forming and then
send them to our molding operations,”
he explains. “We also may have to perform secondary operations or conduct
various inspections. With our previous
quoting software, we had to separately
create a quote for each process. That
took a lot of time and work. Now, we
just add processes as line items in the
same quote. We can add new processes
or new facilities to the database as needed. Doing it this way is faster, and we get
all of the processes on one sheet instead
of one sheet for each process.”
By Eck’s calculations, timesavers such
as this have cut quote-generation times
by at least 25 percent, depending on
complexity, and made final quotes
much easier to track and read.
The new software also makes quote
revisions easier to follow. With the old
system, each revision was entered into
the system as a new quote, with a num26
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ber completely unrelated to the prior
version. Now, with each revision the
new software assigns a dash and number to the original quote number. For
example, the second revision to quote
No. 1522 would be No. 1522-2 with the
new software. The old way, a revision to
quote No. 1522 might read as No. 2535
with no easily identifiable way to connect that number to the original.
The cut-and-paste capability of the
new Windows-based quoting program
also pays dividends.
“Before, we could not cut and paste
text or data,” Eck recalls. “A salesman
would say, ‘Here’s a paragraph I need in
the quote.’ The paragraph may state
certain packaging, quality-testing or
other special requirements. The old system did not have the flexibility to accept
that paragraph. With the new software,
the salesman sends me the e-mail, I
copy and paste it right into the quote.
That saves me all of the typing and
proofreading and reduces the chances of
errors.”
change select items such as feed rates
and press sizes. The old way, we would
have spent a couple of days putting all
this together, creating all quotes for all
14 dies from scratch. But we were able
to complete that quote package within
half a day.”
The Quoting System
in Practice
At Plainfield Companies, the new
quoting system has been customized to
reflect the internal quoting hierarchy.
RFQs received by sales personnel are
sent to the sales secretary, who enters
basic quote information—such as
addresses and contact personnel—into
a limited-access version of the system
and assigns a quote number. The sales
personnel usually identify one of the
four Plainfield Companies locations as
the preliminary location where the work
Advantages to
Quicker Quoting
The ability to quote quickly enables
Plainfield Companies to position itself
better among the competition, increasing the probability of quotes turning
into jobs.
“Recently, a customer called and
requested a quote within one day,” says
Eck. “The job involved stampings,
moldings, secondary operations, mold
insertion, continuity testing, special
packaging—just about everything we
do. We would have never completed
the quote on time using our old system,
but with what we have now, we turned
it around within a day.
“Also,” Eck continues, “we recently
had to supply, within a couple of days,
a quote for takeover work on 14 progressive dies. The potential customer
supplied us with all of the information needed to supply a quote, but we
had to work that across all 14 dies.
With the new quoting program, we set
up the first die quote as the master,
then copied that master for the next 13.
In those 13, we just had to go in and
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SEPTEMBER 2005
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Quoting Worth Noting
is to be performed. Then the estimating
team accesses the quote and fills in the
nuts and bolts such as processes, materials, packaging, quantities, etc., and
may change locations if one seems to be
a better fit than the original destination.
Again, all of the production and
machine-rate information is based on
figures supplied by company management and stored in a database. That
information automatically uploads
into the quote. As the estimators change
or add information to individual fields
within the quote, the entire quote is
updated to reflect those changes. This
allows estimators to determine optimal use of machinery and locations to
provide the most competitive quote
possible.
In specifying materials, the quote
teams sends the quote over to the purchasing department to price materials
and determine lead time. In addition,
quotes may be sent to one of the four
company locations so that their management personnel can weigh in on
suitability for the job.
The new system also tracks quote
status, enabling Plainfield Companies to
print weekly reports that explain how
many quotes are closed, how many are
waiting for information from the potential customer or salesperson, and how
many have been awarded to Plainfield
Companies.
“We can look back and produce
spreadsheets to determine our hit ratio,
or ratio of quotes made to quotes we’ve
been awarded,” explains Eck. “We can
even look at a specific customer and
see that we were awarded a certain percentage of the quotes we supplied.
If we’ve produced 500 quotes for a
potential customer, for example, and
have been awarded no jobs, that tells us
that it’s time to move on. We couldn’t do
that kind of analysis with our old
system.”
When closed, a quote can be printed
out on company letterhead and sent to
the potential customer. A backup copy
of the quote, for internal use only, provides detailed job notes and machine
rates.
Growing with the Program
Moving forward, Plainfield Companies’ officials are looking to enhance
the quoting system with a 3D add-on
from Cimatron. With this DieQuote
module, a multiformed blank can be
unfolded to a flat blank, easing the
quoting process.
“That saves even more on quoting
time,” says Eck. “Now, we figure out the
forming steps and what the flat blank
would look like and draw it up in CAD.
With the 3D add-on, the flat blank and
related information are dumped right
into the quote.”
The customized DieQuote package
developed for Plainfield Companies
also offers paperless capability, which
the company has yet to implement.
That would allow automatic electronic
transfer of quote information internally and externally.
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