M3 Fabrication Cuts Quoting Time from Weeks/Days to Days/Hours with Paperless Parts

Background

Established in March 2014, M3 Fabrication LLC is a family-owned, community-oriented business renowned for its personalized customer service, competitive pricing, efficient production, and dependable delivery. Originally focused on material handling, M3 Fab now offers diverse custom metal fabrication services, catering to both small-scale and large-volume orders. Co-owners Sam and Tyler McClure pride themselves on running a business that guarantees quality craft and an amazing product.

Challenge

Prior to partnering with Paperless Parts, “Quoting was probably our biggest issue,” says Sam. “Entering everything manually into our ERP was pretty painful—building a BOM and router completely from scratch—it was very time-consuming. Then let’s say we had a win rate of 20%; we just wasted 80% of our quoting time entering junk data into a system that we’re not even going to use.”

That inefficient process was also eating into their RFQ response times. Sam explains, “You want to get laser packages back to your customer within 1-2 days max, and larger weld packages usually within one week. We were returning quotes for laser packages in 1-2 weeks, and 3-4 weeks for larger weld packages.”

Tyler was noticing inconsistencies in their team’s costing and pricing as they scaled: “We went from a team of 3 to over 60, and we were finding that everybody was using different quoting models and generating different prices.”

M3 Fab also struggled when it came to resource efficiency. Tyler reflects, “Because we offer so many different processes, we were using so many unique software systems—RADAN, Ncell, a TRUMPf tube laser software—just to get accurate times.”

That also created bottlenecks on the shop floor. “Everybody had to fight for those licenses. It hampers production when you have five estimators working in a seat-based system that our production team has to wait to be able to access.”

Aiming to standardize and streamline its quoting process, M3 Fab purchased a quoting software that could allegedly integrate with its ERP system. When the integration failed and they were left without customer support, they began exploring other options.

Solution

Paperless Parts transformed M3 Fab’s quoting process, enabling faster, more efficient, and consistent quoting.

Paperless Parts automates much of the manual, repetitive admin tasks associated with quoting at M3 Fab. “I’m able to return most laser packages within a couple of hours now and weld packages within a few days,” says Sam. “It would have been great to have Paperless during COVID when everything was ‘as soon as you can get it to me!’ That could have been a huge advantage for us.” Today, Sam says that the COVID mentality, or buyers’ expectation of an “Amazon-like experience” hasn’t changed much. “Everyone naturally expects quotes to be returned faster.”

M3 Fab now also has more hands on deck. “Previously, Sam and I were at a point where we weren’t sure how we, as business owners, could trust others to quote without our involvement. We weren’t sure how we would scale our business. Now, with Paperless Parts, we can train people to quote much more easily,” says Tyler.

Another benefit M3 Fab has seen since implementing Paperless Parts is customer satisfaction. “We’ve had excellent customer feedback,” says Tyler. “One of the things I struggled with before Paperless Parts was collaborating with our buyers; we would come up with a concept for someone, and I had no easy way of sharing it with them. Securely sharing any file type with our customers, showing them what it will look like, and how you’re quoting it makes that collaboration so much easier.”

Tyler finds a lot of value in being able to see his customers’ interaction with their quotes. “One of my favorite parts of Paperless is the ability to see when your customer is looking at a quote, how many times they’ve looked at it—it lets you know they’re interested so you can quickly send them a reminder.”

M3 Fab also recently transitioned ERP systems to Global Shop Solutions, which Paperless Parts integrates with. “It was probably the least painful integration I’ve ever been part of,” says Tyler. “The systems talk to one another and help eliminate a lot of duplicative work for our team. Both companies have really held our hand through the growing pains over the last few months.”

Results

With the help of Paperless Parts, M3 Fab has:

Eliminated expenses. Paperless Parts consolidated the multiple software programs M3 Fab previously relied on to quote, eliminating the need for additional expensive licenses.

Improved customer satisfaction. M3 Fab sees positive feedback from its customers on its new quoting system. “A couple of our customers are giving us more work because they’re using us to compare our prices with what they can do internally to see what they should outsource. They’re able to do that since we’re able to turn their quotes around so fast,” says Tyler.

Enabled their business to scale. As M3 Fab looks to expand and grow its team, bringing on new estimators feels much more doable for Sam and Tyler: “With the automation and workflows in Paperless Parts, we can expand our estimating team a lot more easily and comfortably because we know we can trust the numbers without having to provide quite as much oversight as we had to in the past.”