How a 24-hour quote actually happens

A quote starts the moment your file lands — not when it reaches the top of a pile. A person opens it, checks it’s complete (geometry, material, thickness, quantity) and, if something’s missing, replies with the one question that unblocks it rather than sitting on it. Most of the 24 hours is doing the work; almost none of it is queue.

Before anything gets priced, the file goes through the same design-for-manufacturing check the machine would force later — hole sizes, edge distances, bend flanges, corners. Catching a problem now costs a sentence in the quote; catching it after cutting costs a scrapped batch. This is the step a too-cheap quote skips.

The parts get nested — arranged on the stock sheet to use as little material as possible, because the sheet is a real cost and the offcut is scrap you’d otherwise pay for. The nest tells us exactly how much material the job needs and how long the machine runs, which are the two biggest numbers in the price.

Material from the nest, machine time from the cut path, plus bending, welding and finishing if the job needs them, plus the hardware. Add it up and you have a price built from the actual work — not a rate-per-kilo guess that has to hide a margin for everything it didn’t look at.

You get a price, a lead time, and any DFM flags with a suggested fix — usually within 24 hours of a complete file. Approve it and the same nest that priced the job is the one that cuts it. Nothing gets re-drawn, re-quoted or re-queued; the work we did to price it is the work that makes it.