Tired of wasting hours on emails, spreadsheets, and chasing down orders? You’re not alone—and you don’t need a giant software overhaul to fix it. Here’s how smart manufacturers are cutting admin time in half with real, workable solutions.
If you run a manufacturing business, odds are your day doesn’t start on the shop floor—it starts in your inbox. Request for Quotes (RFQs), product inquiries, Bill of Materials (BOMs), order updates, and that one customer asking about their shipment again. Multiply that by five days a week and you’ve got a serious drain on your team’s time, energy, and focus.
But here’s the good news: you don’t need to invest in a full-scale ERP system to get that time back. In this article, we’ll walk through five specific time-wasting areas—and how manufacturers like you are fixing them with simple tools, smarter workflows, and just a few practical changes.
The Hidden Time Sink: Where All the Hours Go
Let’s call it what it is—most manufacturing businesses spend more time on administrative tasks than they care to admit. It’s not because they’re inefficient. It’s because the systems they’re using—email, spreadsheets, disconnected tools—just aren’t designed for speed. Every RFQ that comes in via email has to be sorted, routed, opened, and responded to. Every quote has to be manually built. BOMs are often a mess of formats. And then there’s the discount approval chain, purchase order tracking, invoice follow-ups… it all adds up.
If you’ve ever caught yourself thinking, “Why am I still doing this manually?”—you’re not alone. One small business owner recently told us they were spending nearly 15 hours a week just building and revising quotes. That’s two full workdays. The kicker? Most of that work could have been automated or at least cut in half with better systems.
Here’s a simple way to think about it: time you spend chasing paperwork is time you’re not spending winning more jobs, training your team, improving production, or serving your best customers. It slows your business down. And even though these tasks seem small on their own, together they create a massive drag on growth.
The cost isn’t just the hours—it’s the opportunity loss. When your team is bogged down in quoting and PO tracking, they’re not thinking about better pricing strategies, faster customer service, or how to turn that one-time RFQ into a long-term relationship. That’s why solving these problems isn’t just about efficiency—it’s about creating more headspace for your team to do what actually drives revenue and margin.
Now, we’re not here to tell you to “go digital” and throw out all your systems. That’s overwhelming and often unnecessary. Instead, the rest of this article will walk through five high-friction areas where manufacturing businesses like yours are wasting the most time—and five clear, realistic fixes that don’t require months of implementation or major software investments.
1. RFQs via Email: Why You’re Stuck—and How to Unstick It
Most RFQs come in through email. Seems simple enough—until you realize someone has to open that email, check the specs, find the right person to respond, and manually start building a quote. Multiply that by dozens of requests a week, and it’s no wonder teams are buried.
A smarter fix? Use a shared inbox system like Front or Missive that routes incoming RFQs to the right person automatically based on keywords, customer names, or product types. You can even add simple automations that send an acknowledgment email right away so the customer doesn’t wonder if it got lost. Some companies also use an AI assistant like Levity or Tidio to sort and tag RFQs by urgency, size, or region. That’s not sci-fi—it’s just practical workflow automation.
One hypothetical scenario: imagine a Midwest-based supplier who handles 50 RFQs a week. Before, their sales lead spent two hours each morning sorting through them. After implementing a shared inbox and simple auto-routing rules, that same task takes 10 minutes—and they respond to RFQs 3x faster.
2. BOM Parsing: Turn Spreadsheet Chaos Into Clickable Clarity
Parsing BOMs manually is another time-waster. Files arrive in all kinds of formats—Excel, PDFs, even scanned faxes (yes, still). Then someone on your team has to extract the right part numbers, quantities, lead times, and pricing data. It’s tedious, error-prone, and often gets bottlenecked with one person who “knows how to do it.”
The fix: AI-powered BOM readers like SourceDay or Paperless Parts can extract and structure BOMs into a clean, interactive format in seconds. They don’t just copy-paste—they interpret line items, flag missing specs, and even connect to your part database. If those are too big a leap, even a simple template with built-in Excel macros and validation rules can cut hours off the process.
Let’s say you run a 20-person CNC shop and regularly receive 5–10 BOMs a week. By implementing an AI BOM parser, you could cut down BOM processing time from 45 minutes to under 10 per file—and reduce quoting errors by over 60%.
3. Quote Creation: Ditch the Spreadsheets, Keep the Control
You probably have a “master quote template” in Excel. Maybe a few of them. Maybe each person on your team has their own version. That works… until someone forgets to update pricing or uses the wrong margin formula.
Here’s the insight: quoting software doesn’t have to mean a full-blown CPQ platform. Tools like Quotient, Xometry’s job board, or even custom-built Google Sheets with real-time pricing updates can bring speed and consistency. Want something AI-powered? Try SmartPricing or even a ChatGPT-based internal bot that builds first-draft quotes based on product info and historical pricing.
One practical approach we’ve seen: a fabrication shop built a Google Sheet with drop-down menus for part types, materials, and quantities. It auto-calculated pricing using a margin formula and pulled raw material costs from a shared tab updated weekly. That single sheet cut quote prep time by 70%—and made it easier to train new staff.
4. Manual Discounting and Approvals: Stop the Back-and-Forth
When discounts or custom pricing need approvals, the process often turns into an email ping-pong match. “Can we do 5% off on this order?” “Hold on, let me check.” It’s slow, inconsistent, and easy to miss.
Here’s a better way: use approval workflows in tools like HubSpot Quotes, Zoho CRM, or even shared Slack channels with pre-set rules. You can define thresholds—say, anything under 10% discount auto-approves, but anything over needs manager sign-off. Add comments, see history, done.
Let’s say your team handles 20 custom quotes a week, half of which require a discount. If each approval takes 15 minutes of back-and-forth, that’s 2.5 hours gone. Automate the logic, and those approvals can happen in real-time—freeing your salespeople to close more, not chase sign-offs.
5. Purchase Order Tracking and Payment Follow-Ups: Make It Self-Serve
PO tracking is the silent time drain. A customer sends a PO. Your team manually updates the system. Then comes the follow-up: “Has my order shipped?” “Where’s the invoice?” “Can I pay by card?” Multiply that across dozens of customers and it’s a full-time job.
The smarter approach is to make this self-serve. Use portals like Orderful or even basic client dashboards built with Notion, Trello, or Monday.com. These let customers track order status, download invoices, and submit payments without having to email your team. You can also plug in payment links from tools like Melio, Stripe, or QuickBooks to reduce friction and speed up receivables.
A hypothetical example: A custom parts maker was spending 10–15 hours a week answering order status emails. By giving repeat customers a simple dashboard link with live updates, they cut that time to under two hours—and their on-time payments improved because customers had everything they needed, when they needed it.
3 Clear Takeaways You Can Start Using This Week
1. Start Small—Pick One Area to Fix This Week.
Don’t try to overhaul everything. Start with RFQ routing or quote creation—whatever eats up the most time. One quick win builds momentum and gives your team confidence.
2. Use Off-the-Shelf Tools Before Going Big.
You don’t need a massive ERP. Tools like shared inboxes, AI BOM readers, or custom quote sheets can deliver huge value fast—and they’re easy to test.
3. Give Your Customers (and Team) More Self-Serve Options.
Dashboards, portals, and automation don’t just save your team time—they make your business easier to work with. That’s a competitive edge.
You don’t need to wait months or spend thousands to get your time back. You just need a few practical tweaks—and a willingness to rethink the way things have “always been done.”