3. Requests by email, the AI Assistant and the part library
Turn a customer’s email into a draft quote, let the ✨ AI Assistant read their drawings and fill in each part (your rates still set the price), quote repeat parts from the customer’s library, and check your rates against what the floor actually takes.
Where it is
- Inbox — 📐 Make a draft quote on a customer’s email
- Manufacturing → Customer parts
- Manufacturing → Quoting rates — Quoted against actual, at the bottom
From an email
In the Inbox, on a customer's email asking for a price, 📐 Make a draft quote starts a quote for them and opens the AI Assistant with the email's words already in it. Add the drawings attached to the email: they aren't copied across on their own.
✨ AI Assistant
Describe the parts and add the drawings. A DXF is measured exactly, as in Part costing. A PDF or photo is read by the assistant, which says what each drawing states and how sure it is.
Each part comes back as a card: the sheet it picked from your stock, the blank, cut length and pierces, the route through your work centres, what it assumed, and a Confident / Check it / Unsure marker. The assistant never sets a price: every card is priced by your Quoting rates, exactly as Part costing would. Change the sheet, blank, cut length or pierces and the price is worked out again. Tick the parts you want and Add. Its questions for the customer are listed at the top: send them before you send the quote.
The part library
When a quote with Part costing or AI-quoted lines is accepted, each of those parts becomes a product of its own (FAB-00001 and on) at the quoted price. It gets a draft BOM, revision A, for you to check and release, with the sheet and a routing step for each costed step, and the quote's quantity breaks as its price breaks.
Manufacturing → Customer parts lists them: Part, Customer, Their part no., Rev, Ordered and Last quoted. Set the customer's own part number and revision here.
Next time they ask, 🗂 Customer's parts on their quote lists what they've had made. Pick a quantity and it's priced again on today's rates, next to what it was last quoted at.
Are your rates right?
Once library parts have been made and clocked on the floor, Quoted against actual at the bottom of Quoting rates shows each work centre's Quoted min against its Actual min, Actual ÷ quoted, and What it suggests. A centre running well over is under-priced: raise its sell rate or setup minutes, or slow its cut speeds. One running well under may be pricing you out of work. With too few steps it says Too few steps to say yet.
Lesson 3 of 6 in Quoting and quality for fabricators. Previous: 2. Pricing a part: Part costing and the drawing. Next: 4. First article and QC on the floor.