Engineer to order

Engineer-to-order software for a quote that is itself a project

When a bid takes three weeks of engineering, costs $12,000 to produce and wins one time in five, the front end of the business needs managing as carefully as the build.

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Diagram titled "Engineer-to-order bidding", showing the seven RFQ-to-order stages from enquiry intake through to accepted order.

In short

KanchanFlow is an RFQ-to-Order CRM for engineer-to-order manufacturers. It treats a bid as a project with its own cost: engineering hours are logged against the RFQ, assumptions and exclusions are structured records carried into every revision, and revision history is unlimited across a negotiation that may run a year.

An engineer-to-order business has a problem a job shop does not: the quote is expensive. Producing a credible bid for a custom machine, a process skid or a special-purpose handling system means an engineer sketching a layout, a preliminary bill of material, four vendor enquiries for long-lead items, and a controls estimate. Three weeks of real work, most of which is spent on projects you will not win.

Every other problem in an ETO front end follows from that. Bid selection matters more than price. Exclusions matter more than inclusions. And a negotiation that runs nine months will outlast the memory of everybody involved unless it is on a record.

Why ETO is different

Four numbers that change how the front end works

These are the structural facts of an engineer-to-order business, and they are why a standard sales pipeline fits it badly.

Quote duration: 2 to 6 weeks; A job-shop quote takes hours. An ETO quote takes an engineer, a layout, a preliminary BOM and a vendor package.
Estimating cost: $4k to $30k; Real engineering hours go into a bid you may not win. Untracked, this is the largest uncosted expense in an ETO business.
Win rate: Often 15 to 30 percent; Which means four bids are paid for by every one that lands. Bid selection is the commercial decision, not price.
Negotiation length: 3 to 12 months; Across which the scope changes repeatedly and the person you are talking to may change twice.

The bid package

Eight things an ETO quote carries

Each one is a structured part of the quote record, not a paragraph somebody rewrites for every proposal.

Element	What it holds
Scope statement	What is included, stated positively
Exclusions list	What is not included — the single most valuable page in an ETO quote
Assumptions register	Site power, foundation, access, customer-supplied items, approvals
Preliminary BOM	Major assemblies and long-lead items, priced or budgeted
Vendor quote pack	Bought-out items with the vendor, validity date and quoted price held per line
Engineering hours estimate	Design, drafting, controls, commissioning, split by discipline
Milestone payment schedule	Deposit, drawing approval, factory acceptance, delivery, commissioning
Terms, escalation and validity	Especially the material escalation clause on a nine-month delivery

The exclusions list earns its place at the top of that table. Most ETO disputes are about something nobody said out loud, and the cheapest moment to say it is in the quote.

Cost of estimating

What a bid actually costs you

Log the hours against the bid, not into overhead. The number changes what you choose to bid on.

Hours logged against the bid — Engineering, drafting and estimating time booked to the RFQ record rather than absorbed into overhead.
Vendor quote effort — Chasing four vendors for a long-lead item is real work. It is logged so bid cost is not understated.

Cost per bid, by customer — After a year this tells you which customers are expensive to bid for and which convert.
Cost of bids lost — The number nobody wants to see and everybody should. It is the budget for being more selective.

A worked example. A builder of custom conveyor systems bids 42 projects a year at an average of 90 engineering hours each. At a loaded $95 an hour that is roughly $360,000 of selling cost, of which about $290,000 is spent on the 33 bids that do not land. When that number becomes visible, the conversation stops being about win rate and becomes about which enquiries deserve a full bid, which deserve a budgetary number, and which deserve a polite decline.

Revision control

Six things that move during a long negotiation

Scope creep arriving as a casual email — can you also include the guarding?
A specification revision from the customer's engineer mid-negotiation
A vendor quote expiring before the customer decides, changing your cost base
Material escalation across a six-month decision window
A change of buyer, who reopens commercial terms you had settled
A budget cycle that moves the whole project one quarter to the right

Each of these produces a revision, and each revision needs a diff a customer can see. When a project that was quoted in March is signed in November at a different number, the chain of revisions is the explanation — the guarding you added, the specification change their engineer issued, the escalation clause that moved the steel.

Vendor quote validity is the trap specific to ETO. A long-lead gearbox quoted in April with a 60-day validity is not a cost you still hold in September. Each bought-out line carries its vendor, quoted price and validity date, and expired vendor pricing is flagged on the quote before it is re-issued.

Boundaries

What we are not, for an ETO business

What this is not

We are not built for enterprise multi-plant OEMs on SAP or Oracle, process manufacturers on recipe-based batching, distributors who need a warehouse management system, or shops requiring HIPAA / FDA validation. If that is you, Salesforce Manufacturing Cloud, NetSuite, or Global Shop Solutions is a better fit.

No engineering BOM with effectivity and change orders. No resource-loaded project schedule. No earned-value or percentage-of-completion reporting. No CAD, no PLM, no document control system for approval drawings. An ETO business of any size needs a project-based ERP for those, and we are designed to sit in front of one rather than replace it.

Questions from engineer-to-order builders

Neither in the usual sense. It is the front end of an ETO business — the bid, the estimating effort, the assumptions and exclusions, the revisions and the negotiation. It is not project manufacturing, it does not carry a multi-level engineering BOM, it does not do resource-loaded project scheduling, and it does not run earned-value reporting. Those live in a project-based ERP. If you need one, buy one, and connect it to this.

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