What a job shop CRM is
A job shop lives on variety. One enquiry is a batch of turned shafts, the next is a weldment to a customer drawing, the next a one-off fixture — different material, different operations, different setup every time. That variety is exactly what a generic sales CRM cannot cope with, because it wants to model each sale as a contact and a single value you type in. A job shop CRM is a manufacturing CRM built for the opposite reality: it treats each enquiry as its own document with drawings and item lines, insists on estimating it against a bill of materials before a price is set, and carries that estimate through a versioned quotation to a won order without anything being re-keyed.
In other words, it is document-and-status driven. Every enquiry, quotation and order is a real commercial document advanced through a defined lifecycle — Enquiry Received, Under Feasibility, Under Estimation, Quotation Sent, Order Received — so the pipeline is a set of numbers a manager can filter and age, not a stack of PDFs and a salesperson's memory. This is the model behind Fast CRM for job shops and custom engineering.
The estimating problem no catalogue solves
The core difficulty of running a job shop is that the price is the product of the work, not a number you can look up. Each enquiry is a fresh combination of raw material, cutting or forming operations, setup time, finishing and inspection. Guess low and you win a loss-making job; guess high and you lose a job you could have made money on. Most shops manage this with a spreadsheet template and an estimator's experience — which works until the estimator is on leave, or the customer asks for the quote to be revised, or the manager wants to know how much estimating effort went into jobs that never converted.
A job shop CRM turns estimating from a private spreadsheet skill into a repeatable, visible process. The enquiry is a document; the estimate is built against it; the quotation references it; and the whole chain stays linked so the next revision starts from the last estimate rather than a blank sheet. When the enquiry is not worth pursuing it is marked regretted and kept for analytics, so the shop can finally see its real conversion rate by job type and by customer.
Feasibility: the step generic CRMs skip
Before a job shop spends estimating effort on an enquiry, it needs to answer a blunt question: can we make this, on our machines, in the time the customer wants? A generic CRM has nowhere to record that decision, so feasibility either happens in someone's head or not at all — and estimating time gets burned on work the shop was never going to take. A job shop CRM makes feasibility an explicit status (Under Feasibility) so the enquiry is consciously assessed as doable before it advances, and an enquiry that fails the test is closed cleanly rather than lingering.
This matters more for a job shop than for almost any other kind of business, because estimating a custom part is expensive. Every hour an estimator spends costing a job that was never feasible is an hour not spent on a job the shop could win. Making feasibility a deliberate gate protects the shop's scarcest resource — estimating capacity — and keeps the pipeline honest.
Estimation against a BOM/BOR
The heart of a job shop CRM is estimation against a bill of materials and bill of resources. The enquiry is costed by building an estimation structure: the child materials with their quantities, and the operations and resources — machines, labour, setup — each level consumes. Because the CRM shares the same BOM/BOR engine the shop floor uses, the estimate is grounded in the real definition of the part rather than a separate sales guess that production later has to argue with. A techno-commercial review can finalise the number before it becomes a quote.
The payoff is threefold. First, margin is protected because the quoted price is derived from real material and process cost rather than a round number. Second, the estimate is reusable — when the customer asks for a revised quantity or a material change, the estimator adjusts the existing structure instead of starting over. Third, when the job is won, production is planning against a structure it already understands, so nothing is lost in translation between the quote and the work order.
Estimating custom jobs in a spreadsheet?
We can show you a live enquiry — costed against a BOM/BOR, quoted, revised and converted into an order — in 30 minutes, on one of your own jobs.
Quotation revisions and comparison
Custom work is negotiated work, so quotations change — a quantity is revised, a tolerance is relaxed, a material is swapped, a price is challenged. A job shop CRM handles this properly: each quotation revision is versioned while the full history is preserved, the quote is gated through an approval step before it goes out, and a comparison view lets a salesperson or manager see across revisions or competing options. That replaces the familiar mess of files named "quote-final-v3-revised" with a clean trail of exactly what was quoted, what changed and why.
The commercial value is that nobody is ever unsure what the customer currently holds. When a buyer calls to negotiate, the salesperson can see the live revision, its terms and its history in one place, and can raise the next revision from it in a controlled way rather than editing a document and hoping the version numbers stay straight.
Measuring a true win rate
Because every enquiry — won, lost or regretted — stays in the system as a document, a job shop can finally measure its real performance. Conversion analytics compare enquiries against orders, and the same data can be sliced by enquiry source, by salesperson and by job type, so the shop learns which channels bring work it actually wins and where estimating effort is being spent on enquiries that never convert.
One chain from drawing to won order
A machining shop receives a drawing for a small batch of custom brackets. The enquiry is captured with the drawing and quantity; the estimator checks feasibility on the available machines, then builds an estimate against a BOM/BOR covering material, turning, milling and finishing. A quotation is raised and, after the customer asks for a higher quantity, revised once — the estimate is adjusted rather than rebuilt. Inside sales chase the sent quote on the follow-up dashboard, and on the win it converts to a confirmed order that the shop floor plans against using the same structure. The manager can see, across the quarter, exactly which job types the shop wins and which it regrets.
Connecting the quote to the shop floor
A job shop CRM earns its keep at the moment a quote is won. Because the estimate was built on the same BOM/BOR engine the factory uses, the confirmed order converts with no re-entry and the shop floor plans against a structure it already understands. The released order is the handoff artifact to Fast Production and Fast ERP, which generate process sheets and work orders against it, and to Fast Billing, which dispatches and invoices against the same order on one shared customer master — so there is no gap between the sales order and the tax invoice.
That end-to-end continuity is the whole argument for a document-driven job shop CRM over a generic contact tool. The estimate a salesperson quoted, the revision the customer agreed and the order the shop is now cutting are one chain on one platform — visible, aged and accountable from drawing to dispatch.
How Fast CRM implements it
Fast CRM for job shops is a working implementation of everything above, built by Improsys in Pune on the shared Fast Suite platform:
It runs in the cloud or on-premise, suits engineering job shops across India and worldwide, and can run standalone or as part of a full Fast ERP install. See the job shop CRM software page for how each capability maps to your estimating desk.
Frequently asked questions
What is a job shop CRM?
A job shop CRM is a manufacturing CRM built for custom fabrication and machining firms where every enquiry is different and needs estimating before it can be priced. It captures each enquiry as a document with drawings and item lines, checks feasibility, costs it against a BOM/BOR, raises a versioned quotation, and chases it to a won order on follow-up dashboards. It is document-and-status driven rather than a generic contact CRM, so the estimate, the quote revisions and the order all sit on one chain.
Why does a job shop need estimation before every quote?
Because no two jobs are alike, a job shop cannot price from a catalogue. Each enquiry is a fresh combination of material, operations and setup, so the only reliable price is a roll-up of the actual cost of making that item — built as an estimation structure against a BOM/BOR. Estimating before quoting protects margin, makes revisions repeatable, and means the number sales commits to is one the shop can actually deliver at a profit.
How does a job shop CRM handle quotation revisions?
Custom work is negotiated, so quotations change. A job shop CRM versions each revision while preserving the full history, gates the quote through an approval step before it is sent, and offers a comparison view across revisions or competing options. That means a salesperson and a manager can see exactly what was quoted, what changed and why, instead of hunting through files named quote-final-v3.
Can a job shop CRM track enquiries that were not pursued?
Yes. An enquiry that will not be pursued is marked regretted rather than deleted, so it stays in the conversion analytics. That lets a job shop measure its true win rate, understand which enquiry sources and job types it wins or walks away from, and see where estimating effort is being spent on work that never converts.
Does a job shop CRM connect estimation to the shop floor?
Yes. The estimate is built on the same BOM/BOR engine the factory uses, so when a quotation is won and converts into a confirmed order, production is not decoding a fresh set of requirements — the structure it plans against is the one sales already costed. The released order hands off to Fast Production and Fast Billing on one shared customer record, with no re-entry between the sales order and the tax invoice.