Change is Good: The Evolution of a Digital Quoting Platform

We launched our company and its digital manufacturing model more than 20 years ago, and a necessary constant throughout those past two decades in the industry has been change. You simply cannot survive as a technology-forward manufacturing company that is complacent with where it is at—you have to be future-facing.

And we’ve worked tirelessly to embody that notion of perpetual evolution by expanding our manufacturing services, enhancing our capabilities, moving beyond the antiquated idea that quick-turn manufacturing is limited to prototyping. But we haven’t been the only ones with restless legs. The companies we work with and customers we serve—designers, engineers, product developers, procurement teams—have grown along with us. You have shortened development cycles, you need to react quickly to shifts in market demand, and you want an end-to-end supplier that you can leverage at any point in your manufacturing process, whether that’s prototyping or production.

So we have this partnership of sorts now—between manufacturing supplier and customer—with common challenges that need to be tackled. And often the first point of contact in this partnership is our quoting and ordering experience. You can get an interactive part quote, get design feedback on those parts, and place orders quickly. It’s a solid quoting engine that has served us and our customers well over the years. But in the spirit of evolution, we’ve been building something bigger, better, more productive—our all-new digital quoting platform.

Some might say if it ain’t broke, why fix it? We get it, and we want to reassure you that the things you’ve enjoyed about our previous platform are not going anywhere, they’ve just gotten better. Here are some reasons why change is good.

Faster, Easier, More Intuitive: You now have a much more intuitive, user-friendly, faster interface so you spend less time uploading, quoting, and ordering parts, and more time bringing ideas to market. It’s a total online, digital experience with seamless navigation and collaboration within your account.

All Services Within a Single Experience: Three of our services (molding, machining, 3D printing) are now united in a single platform for a much easier, less painful quoting and ordering experience.

More Collaboration Tools: You can create Projects, which allow for teams of users vs single user. Our Forward a Quote function lets you easily share quotes with collaborators, who can in turn adjust lead time, materials, finishing, and other options to see real-time pricing impact.

Enhanced Manufacturing Analysis: We’ve kept the overall DNA of our DFM intact from our previous platform but have improved your interactive analysis to make the walk-through of the manufacturing feedback clear and concise, and your 3D viewer and part thumbnails are now larger and easier to view.

Service Line Standouts: Each service has some unique features that we think you’ll enjoy. With injection molding, you can now view and discuss your gate and ejector pin layout before you order your tooling and parts.

With CNC machining, we’ve drastically simplified threading assignments allowing you to easily click on any hole features and assign required threads. And with 3D printing, we kept the pricing table intact so you can see real-time cost implications based on your choice of additive material and resolution level.