Case Study: How a Midwest CNC Shop Cut Quote Time from 4 Days to Same-Day

The shop: A 45-person precision CNC machining operation in central Indiana, serving aerospace and defense customers. Annual revenue around $8 million. Running JobBOSS for ERP, QuickBooks for accounting, and everything else in email and spreadsheets.

The problem: Quote turnaround averaged 4.2 business days. The owner and two estimators handled all incoming RFQs, but the process was entirely manual — reading emails, pulling up drawings, checking material availability, estimating cycle times, and drafting responses. During busy periods, quotes would sit for a week or more.

The secondary problem: Production scheduling lived on a whiteboard in the shop manager's office. When the shop manager was out, nobody knew the real status of any job. Missed handoffs between first and second shift were a weekly occurrence.

The deployment: 1776 Claw was implemented in two phases. Phase 1 (weeks 1-2) focused on RFQ Claw — connecting to the shop's email system, extracting RFQ details from incoming messages and attachments, and generating draft quote summaries for the estimators to review.

Phase 2 (weeks 3-4) added Ops Claw — integrating with JobBOSS to pull job status data and creating a real-time production dashboard accessible from any device on the shop floor.

The results after 6 weeks were significant. Quote turnaround dropped from 4.2 days to same-day for 78% of incoming RFQs. The estimators reported spending 60% less time on data extraction and initial setup. The production dashboard eliminated the whiteboard entirely — shift handoffs became a 5-minute review instead of a 30-minute guessing game.

The owner's summary: 'We didn't change how we work. We just stopped wasting time on the parts that weren't actually work. The quoting is the big win — we're responding faster than shops twice our size, and customers are noticing.'

Revenue impact in the first quarter post-deployment: the shop quoted 23% more jobs (because the pipeline moved faster) and won 15% more of those quotes (because they responded first). Net revenue increase attributed to faster quoting: approximately $180,000 per quarter.