RapidDirect’s quote management system saves you time by bringing all your requests and orders together in one place. Say goodbye to endless searching and negotiating.
Getting a quote shouldn’t be a time-consuming obstacle to manufacturing. And with RapidDirect, it doesn’t have to be.
What sounds better: sending 50 email requests and waiting for 50 individual responses, or requesting a quote through RapidDirect, where we do all the legwork for you?
That’s what we thought.
Quote management with RapidDirect is about more than just finding the best manufacturer for the project in the easiest way possible.
It’s about keeping all your manufacturing activity in one place so you can manage multiple orders in the simplest way possible. It’s about finding quotations and invoices in a matter of seconds. It’s about simplifying bulk orders containing multiple parts in varying quantities.
How do you request a quote for a manufacturing job?
Normally, it goes like this: you search around for potential partners, researching their capabilities, prices and lead times. Ideally, you also find out whether they have a good reputation — though that’s easier said than done.
Once you’ve looked into a few companies, you settle on a shortlist. (The more hours you’re willing to put in, the longer the shortlist.) You then need to send an email to each potential partner, outlining your project.
And then… waiting.
Unless you have one single company in mind for a project — a previous partner, perhaps — requesting a quote means waiting on several companies to respond to your request.
You’ll only know who’s offering the best deal once everyone has replied, and even then you might not be sure which company offers the best quality.
Thankfully, there’s an alternative to that painstaking process.
When requesting a quote from RapidDirect, you aren’t just asking one manufacturer for a price; you’re getting a ticket into China’s largest manufacturing network.
When you upload your files with us, we’ll ask the 50+ companies in our manufacturing network if they’re up for the job. From the ones who bid, we assess their price, experience, staff size, machine numbers, and other factors in order to identify the very best offer.
And that’s the offer you get back. One simple online quotation gets you a cherry-picked quotation from the best manufacturer available.
RapidDirect makes things simple in other ways too.
The nightmare scenario described above, where you have to email dozens of manufacturers to get a satisfactory quote, doesn’t even take into account the back-and-forth that goes on during each exchange.
Because it’s often much more complicated than simply asking for a price.
Manufacturers want to see your designs, and they also want to know about materials, finishes, deadlines and other factors. Because of this, you’ll invariably have to haggle over various aspects of the project.
In other words, if you’ve got a shortlist of 10 potential manufacturers, you might end up having to send 10 emails to each manufacturer just to communicate your plans. So before you know it, you’re dealing with 100 emails!
RapidDirect, on the other hand, uses an AI-powered quotation engine, so there’s no ambiguity and no haggling.
Everything is specified upfront: you upload your digital files, then select materials, finishes and other requests from drop-down menus. Once you’ve submitted the request for a quote, you won’t have to answer an endless series of questions.
While submitting your request, you can even demand custom bulk pricing. This is highly useful if you’re ordering in large quantities, or if your order consists of several different parts.
With custom bulk pricing, you can also request a quote for different quantity combinations of your individual parts.
For example, you could compare the price of 60 machined bearings + 40 3D printed casings with the price of 40 machined bearings + 60 3D printed casings.
Although RapidDirect makes things extra simple for customers, we’re not just targeting novices and first-time buyers of manufacturing services.
In fact, the online platform is especially useful for professional customers who need to manage complex orders — and perhaps lots of them at once.
If you’re working with several manufacturers and looking over several quotes and completed orders, it can be frustrating to sift through your inbox for the information you need. After all, you might have exchanged dozens of emails with a single manufacturing partner.
With RapidDirect, all your quotations and orders are in one place.
If you need to quickly download a quote in order to print it out for a meeting, you’ll find it in a matter of seconds. If you need to accept five quotations at once, you can do that too.
All your quotations are stored in your personal database, and you can search them by name, number or date. They can also be filtered by their status: Pending, Completed, Order Placed or Cancelled.
You even have access to the entire history of a quotation. If you’ve changed your material requirements, for example, you’ll be able to see the quote before and after the change.
Overall, we think we’ve made quotation management as simple and effective as it can be. Try it today and see for yourself.