The average revenue impact of that gap is 12%. For a manufacturer doing $200 million US a year, that is $24 million US leaving the business before a single product ships - through rework, margin erosion, production delays, and deals lost to faster competitors. Understanding where that cost originates is the first step to addressing it.
The pressures making quoting accuracy a boardroom issue
Three trends are converging in ways that make the manual quoting model increasingly difficult to sustain:
- Rising material costs: Copper, aluminum, and steel fluctuate daily. A quote built on last month's cost sheet may already be underwater before the customer responds.
- Compressed bid cycles: In competitive markets, the speed at which a quote lands is often as decisive as the price itself. Manual approval chains cannot match the turnaround an automated process enables.
- Increasing product complexity: Configured products now carry option spaces that static tools - spreadsheets, shared price books, memory - were never built to govern reliably.
Each of these creates pressure independently. Together, they compound into a quoting environment where small process failures accumulate into significant financial exposure.
The pressure on quoting teams is not coming from one direction - here are the other challenges compounding the problem:
Product complexity outgrows the tools: The quoting problem is not new, but its scale is. Product configurations in industrial manufacturing have become too complex for any individual, or any static spreadsheet, to reliably manage without error.
Getting here was not a single shift. As production models evolved from configure-to-order through assemble-to-order into full engineer-to-order environments, each stage added a layer of variability that spreadsheets and manual processes were not designed to handle.
In engineer-to-order environments, teams are often committing to a price before engineering has finished defining the product, and rough order of magnitude (ROM) estimates regularly diverge from final costs by 15% to 30%.
That divergence is not a quoting mistake. It is a structural gap between the complexity of what is being sold and the tools being used to sell it.
Errors silently enter your quoting process: Most quoting inaccuracy does not come from one obvious mistake. It accumulates across four structural points, each easy to overlook until the cost shows up somewhere else in the business.
- Unpoliced rules: configurations that look valid on paper but cannot be built.
- Stale data: quotes priced against specifications or costs that have already changed.
- Human variance: the same product quoted differently by different reps.
- Approval bottlenecks: approval chains that slow turnaround and divert your most experienced people.
None of these are visible on a single quote. They show up in rework rates, margin variance, and the conversations you end up having with customers after the fact.
Desk errors become downstream problems: Aviation and aerospace safety engineering documented the cost multiplication principle decades ago - the same error costs exponentially more to fix at each subsequent stage of production. Quoting in manufacturing follows the same logic.
Caught before the quote goes out, the cost is minimal. By the time it reaches the production floor, you are looking at a 10 times multiplier. After delivery, 100 times - and that figure includes the customer relationship, not just the direct cost.
If you want a sense of the scale: 3% to 5% of annual cost of goods sold is lost to specification failures alone.
Three moves that close the gap
Moving from the current state to one that is governed and accurate involves three specific shifts, each addressing a root cause directly.
- From static to live pricing: Material and labor costs integrated in real time, so every quote reflects what procurement actually knows at the moment it is produced.
- From memory to encoded rules: Configuration logic built into the system ensures only valid, buildable combinations can be quoted. The knowledge of your best engineers becomes institutional rather than individual.
- From inbox to structured workflow: Approvals governed by business policy rather than availability, so quote turnaround is consistent and senior technical resources are not the bottleneck.
Together, these changes affect not just accuracy but speed, consistency, and the ability to scale quoting capacity without scaling headcount.
Manufacturers who have made this change
The change from manual, judgment-based quoting to a governed, connected process produces consistent results across different manufacturers and different industries.
Volant Products, which makes well casing systems for oil, gas, and geothermal applications, reduced a two-hour manual quoting cycle to under one minute - with 100% accuracy. The change freed their engineering team from quote validation and redirected that capacity to product development.
Fecon, a forestry attachment manufacturer, had dealer bottlenecks caused by manual quote-to-order workflows. Automating that process end to end improved quote speed and consistency across their channel and freed up working capital previously tied up in the delays.
Xpress Boats reduced the number of disconnected systems they were managing by 80% and cut expedited shipping costs by 75% - largely by ensuring the configuration quoted to a customer was the same one that arrived at the production floor.
Different starting points, different industries, consistent direction: faster quotes, fewer corrections, and engineering time returned to the work it should be doing.
See the full picture on July 23
This piece covers the shape and scale of the problem. The webinar on July 23 at 11AM Eastern Time (ET) goes into the detail: the mechanics behind each failure point, the full cost model, and the specific path from where most manufacturers are today to a process that is governed rather than guessed.
John Schuck, Vice President of Sales, Configure Price Quote at Infor, brings direct field experience from hundreds of manufacturer quoting conversations—the pattern recognition that comes from seeing where real processes break down, across industries and company sizes.
Eric Thorsen, Senior Director, Industry & Solution Strategy at Infor, works at the structural level - translating the architecture behind quoting failures into the specific changes manufacturers need to make, and what those changes look like in practice.
Register here: Why Your Quotes Are Wrong