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AI for specialty manufacturers.

Custom AI for $15M-$150M shops where quote turnaround is the competitive moat. Native to Epicor Kinetic, NetSuite Manufacturing, ProShop, JobBOSS, and Global Shop. Working prototype on your real RFQs in 10 days. Fixed fee. Owned by your shop at handoff.

AudienceOwner-CEO led
Revenue range$15M-$150M
Native toEpicor Kinetic, NetSuite, ProShop
Cycle10-day prototype, 7-week build
I · The pattern

"Six-hour quote turnaround. The decision-making is thirty minutes. The other five hours is parsing, lookups, and formatting."

The specialty manufacturer's quoting bottleneck is not skill, and it is not headcount. It is information assembly. The senior estimator at a $34M custom metals shop spends thirty minutes on the actual judgment call, "what should this part cost," and five hours on the part-by-part spec parsing, the pricing lookups against current material costs, the prior-job comparables, and the boilerplate format the customer's procurement system expects.

The custom-AI version of quoting eats the five hours and surfaces the thirty minutes. Not a generic CPQ tool. A system commissioned to your part library, your routings, your pricing rules, your customer history, and your boilerplate. Built in 7 weeks on Epicor Kinetic or NetSuite Manufacturing or ProShop, owned by your shop at handoff.

One client moved from 6-hour to 11-minute quote turnaround. Win rate up 22% on speed alone. Below, the patterns we see in 8 of 10 specialty shops we audit, and the systems we build to remove them.

II · Five patterns we see in 8 of 10 shops

Where the quote actually goes.

Pattern recognition · twelve shop audits

Calibrated against $15M-$150M custom-engineered manufacturers.

01Quote-to-Ship is days, peers are minutes.Recovery range: 50-80% of quote-cycle hours. First-in-wins is real. Median industry win rate uplift on speed alone, in the segments we serve, is 18-25%. Custom CPQ AI parses the RFQ, looks up part history, suggests pricing, drafts the response. Senior estimator validates the judgment call.01Of five
02Specs live in PDFs and one person's head.Recovery range: 4-9% lift in win rate from spec-mismatch reductions. Spec parsing AI extracts tolerances, materials, processes, finish requirements, and validates against your shop's actual capability. Catches the "we can't do that" before the quote goes out, not after the order arrives.02Of five
03RFQ walk-aways: 15-30% of inbound, never quoted.Recovery range: 8-15% revenue uplift on the walkaways alone. Most shops walk away from RFQs the estimator can't get to. The ones that look unfittable but aren't never get a fast no, never get the relationship-builder no. Custom AI triages, drafts a fast no with referral, captures the relationship for a future RFQ.03Of five
04Production planning is a Tuesday morning whiteboard exercise.Recovery range: 12-22% lift in on-time delivery. Routing decisions, work-center load, raw material availability. The AI version reads ERP state, the open RFQ pipe, and the master schedule, surfaces conflicts before they become Wednesday-morning expediting fires.04Of five
05Tribal knowledge ages out with senior estimators.Recovery range: 12-18 months of effective ramp time per junior estimator. The shop's last twenty years of quotes, part histories, and customer-specific rules. Custom retrieval over the archive turns junior estimators into senior contributors for retrieval-heavy quoting.05Of five
III · What we build

Five system shapes.

Drawn from real engagements

7-week builds, fixed-fee, on your ERP, in your tenant.

I.

Custom CPQ AI on Epicor Kinetic / NetSuite / ProShop

II.

Spec parsing & capability validation

III.

RFQ triage & walk-away recovery

IV.

Production-planning conflict surfacing

V.

Estimator-archive RAG

Evidence · Forgehouse Manufacturing, $34M custom metals

6-hour quote turnaround down to 11 minutes. Win rate up 22% on speed alone.

7-week build. Fixed fee. Epicor Kinetic-native. Owned by the shop at handoff.

Read the case →
IV · The calculator, free

Run your shop's number.

8 inputs, 90 seconds

Quote-to-Ship Leak Calculator: your annual revenue leak from slow quoting, walk-aways, and "first-in" deals you're losing on speed alone.

The Quote-to-Ship Leak Calculator.

Your shop's annual revenue leak in real dollars. No exact figures required, honest back-of-envelope works. No follow-up unless you book one.

Run the calculator →
Free · 90 seconds
Real-dollar number
Inputs stay in browser
Email gates the PDF only
V · Frequently asked

Common questions.

Q1What size shops?$15M-$150M specialty manufacturers, custom-engineered, engineer-to-order, made-to-order. Not high-volume commodity manufacturing or aerospace primes.SizingFAQ
Q2Native to our ERP?Yes. Epicor Kinetic, NetSuite Manufacturing, ProShop, JobBOSS, Global Shop. The system reads your part library, your routings, your pricing rules. No ERP migration.StackFAQ
Q3How fast can quoting actually get?Median customer goes from 6-hour quote turnaround to 11-25 minutes. The remaining minutes are the senior estimator's judgment call, not the parsing.SpeedFAQ
Q4Engagement cost?$45K-$180K fixed-fee. Working prototype on real RFQs within 10 days at no cost; payment begins after the prototype works.PricingFAQ
Q5Do you replace estimators?No. Across all engagements, zero estimators have been replaced. Pattern: shops reclaim quoting capacity, then choose to bid on more RFQs they were walking away from.TeamFAQ
Ready when you are

Book the 45-minute diagnosis.

No pitch. No fee. A written map of the quoting bottleneck bleeding your shop, with the dollar figures.

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