Enquiry feasibility and estimation — costing before you quote

Why costing before quoting matters

Ask a job-shop owner how they lose money and the answer is rarely "we lost the order". It is "we won the order at the wrong price". In make-to-order manufacturing, the most expensive mistake is quoting a number pulled from memory or matched to a competitor, then discovering at the shop floor that the real material and process cost leaves no margin — or worse, a loss. Feasibility and estimation exist to stop that happening. They are the two pre-quote steps that turn a raw enquiry into a costed, considered price before it is ever sent to the customer.

This is the single feature that most separates a manufacturing CRM from a generic one. A contact CRM has a "deal value" field — one number, typed by hand. A document-driven CRM has an estimation engine: it builds a structure against a bill of materials, rolls up the cost of actually making the part, and derives the price from that. The difference is the difference between a hopeful figure and a defensible one.

Feasibility — the yes/no step

Feasibility is the first gate, and it is deliberately cheap. Before anyone spends time costing an enquiry, the question is simply: can we make this, do we have the capability and capacity, and do we actually want the work? Some enquiries fail here — a tolerance you cannot hold, a material you do not process, a delivery you cannot meet, or a customer whose commercial terms are not worth pursuing. Catching those at feasibility saves the effort of a full estimate on work you were never going to take.

In Fast CRM feasibility is a real status on the enquiry document — status 32, Under Feasibility — so it is visible and owned rather than an informal shrug. Sales and engineering assess the enquiry together, and the outcome routes it one of two ways: a viable enquiry moves on to estimation, and a non-viable one is regretted with a reason, keeping the data honest. Because feasibility is recorded, a manager can see how many enquiries stall here and why, which is often an early signal about the quality of incoming leads.

Estimation against a BOM/BOR

Once an enquiry is feasible, it moves to estimation — status 33, Under Estimation — where it is costed properly. This is not a spreadsheet on the side; it is a structured cost build against a bill of materials and a bill of resources. The estimator constructs the item as it will actually be made: the child materials with their quantities, and the operations and resources each level consumes. The system rolls that up into a cost, and the price is derived from it with the margin the business needs.

The crucial detail is that Fast CRM shares the same BOM/BOR engine the factory uses. The estimate is not a separate sales invention that engineering later has to reconcile — it is grounded in the real definition of the part. That single fact produces three benefits that compound through the rest of the deal:

• The quoted price reflects true cost, so margin is protected rather than hoped for.
• The estimate can be reused and adjusted for a quotation revision without starting the costing over.
• The structure is already understood by production when the order is won, so nothing is re-worked between sales and the shop.

Estimating inside the CRM is therefore not a bolt-on convenience — it is the bridge between what sales promises and what the factory can deliver at a profit. This is the capability that has no equivalent in a generic contact CRM, and it is why job shops and engineering firms in particular treat it as the killer feature.

The status flow, 31 to 34

Because every step is a real status on the enquiry, the pre-quote phase is measurable rather than a feeling. The enquiry moves through a defined lifecycle, and at any moment you can filter and age the pipeline by exactly where each enquiry sits.

Notice that this is not a Kanban board of cards you drag. Each status is a state on a real commercial document, appended to a full status history, so the enquiry carries its own audit trail. A manager reviewing the funnel sees not just how many enquiries are open, but how many are stuck at feasibility, how many are in estimation, and how long each has been there.

Regretting, not deleting

One discipline deserves its own section because it quietly determines whether all your later analytics are trustworthy: enquiries you decide not to pursue are regretted, not deleted. Status 36, Enquiry Regretted, closes an enquiry with a reason and keeps it in the record. It costs nothing and it changes everything about your reporting.

If dead enquiries are deleted, your conversion rate is a fiction — it only counts the enquiries someone bothered to keep, which flatters every number and hides every pattern. If they are regretted with a reason, your enquiry-to-order ratio is honest, and you can see structural truths: a source that sends volume you consistently turn down, a product line you keep declining, a customer segment that never clears feasibility. That is signal you can act on, and it only exists because nothing was thrown away.

Techno-commercial review

Between the raw estimate and the released quotation sits a finalisation step: the techno-commercial review. This is where the technical cost roll-up and the commercial terms are checked together — the material and process cost, the margin, any special conditions, discounts or payment terms — before the number is committed to a quotation. In Fast CRM this is carried in pre-quote sub-states (statuses 37 and 38) on the enquiry, so approval is a recorded event, not a verbal nod across the office.

The value of a distinct review step is control. It gives a manager a defined moment to confirm the price before it leaves the building, and it means the person who estimates and the person who approves the commercial terms can be different people with different authority. For higher-value enquiries especially, that separation of costing and commercial sign-off is exactly the kind of governance a negotiated B2B sale needs.

How estimation protects margin

Everything in this guide ladders up to one outcome: margin you keep instead of margin you discover you lost. A costed estimate protects margin at quote time, because the price starts from real cost. It protects margin during negotiation, because when a customer pushes for a revision you can see exactly which cost you are giving up and decide deliberately. And it protects margin at delivery, because the estimate the order was won on is the same BOM/BOR structure the factory builds to — there is no gap between the sales promise and the production reality for cost overruns to hide in.

This is also where the pre-sales phase connects to the rest of the deal. The costed enquiry becomes the basis of the quotation and its revisions, and when the quote is won it converts into an order with the structure intact. The estimation you do here is not a throwaway sales step — it is the cost DNA that runs all the way to the invoice.

How Fast CRM implements it

Fast CRM Software, built by Improsys in Pune on the shared Fast Suite platform, implements feasibility and estimation as a working part of the pipeline:

Because the estimate rides the same shared document chain as the enquiry, quotation and order, nothing about the cost basis is re-keyed as the deal advances — and the confirmed order hands off natively to Fast Production and Fast Billing. It deploys in the cloud or on-premise and suits manufacturers of every kind, from job shops to capital-equipment makers, across India and worldwide.

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