For job shops

Job shop software for forty RFQs a week and two estimators

Every job is a first article, every quote starts from a print, and the real constraint is not price — it is which eighteen RFQs you are quietly not going to quote this week.

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Diagram titled "A job shop's week", showing the seven RFQ-to-order stages from enquiry intake through to accepted order.

In short

KanchanFlow is an RFQ-to-Order CRM built for job shops. It triages inbound RFQs against the work you actually win, puts the last accepted cost for a comparable part in front of the estimator, and runs a response clock from arrival — so the eighteen RFQs you cannot quote get a same-day no-bid instead of silence.

The defining fact of a job shop is that nothing repeats reliably. A print arrives, and somebody who knows your machines, your people and your material costs has to decide what it takes to make it. There is no catalogue to look it up in. Every RFQ is an estimating problem before it is a sales problem.

The second defining fact is arithmetic. Below is the week most shops of this size actually run, and the gap at the end of it is where the software has to earn its money.

The week

Forty in, twenty-two out

A representative 25-person job shop. Your numbers will differ; the shape rarely does.

RFQs in: 40 a week; Across email, a web form, two marketplace listings and whatever a buyer texts to the owner.
Estimators: 2; One of whom is also the shop foreman and loses two afternoons a week to the floor.
Time per real quote: 45 to 120 min; Longer if the print is unclear, the material is unusual or an outside service needs a vendor quote.
Capacity: About 22 quotes; Which means 18 of the 40 will not be quoted properly, and the choice of which 18 is currently made by whichever email is on top.

Nothing in this software adds estimating capacity. What it does is make the eighteen a decision rather than an accident, and shorten the twenty-two by putting cost history where the estimator can reach it.

Triage

Six paths an RFQ can take, decided in five minutes

Routing rules sort on material, process, part envelope, customer and completeness before anybody opens a print.

RFQ type	Path	Estimating time
Repeat part, known customer	Quote from last accepted revision	10 minutes
Similar part, known customer	Similar-part search, adjust the buildup	25 minutes
New part, known customer	Full buildup	60 to 120 minutes
New part, new customer, in our envelope	Full buildup after a credit check	60 to 120 minutes
Outside our envelope or capability	No-bid with a recorded reason, same day	5 minutes
Incomplete RFQ	Question back to the buyer, parked with a clock	5 minutes

The two five-minute rows at the bottom are where most of the recovered capacity comes from. A shop that clears its no-bids and its incomplete RFQs on the day they arrive gets back roughly a day a week of estimating time.

What makes a job shop different

Four things that change how the workflow has to work

Every job is a first article — There is no catalogue and no standard cost. Every quote starts from a print, which is why similar-part history is worth more here than in any other shop type.
The customer list is long and shallow — Two hundred accounts, of which fifteen produce most of the revenue and the rest order twice a year. Dormant-account detection matters more than pipeline stages.

Quantities are small and variable — One-off, five-off, then a surprise fifty. Setup dominates the cost, so the quantity break table is the quote.
Response time decides more than price — A buyer sourcing a one-off part is solving a problem today. The shop that answers first is frequently the shop that gets it.

The workflow maps onto this directly. Intake pulls RFQs from four channels into one queue. Routing and qualification decide the path within minutes. The buildup carries quantity breaks because setup dominates a small-quantity price. Revision history is unlimited because a job shop argues about what Rev 2 said more often than it argues about a rate. And the reorder prompt matters because a job shop's repeat work is the only work with a known cost.

Tier fit

Which plan a job shop should actually buy

Your shop	Tier	What you get for it
Under 10 people, one estimator, moving off spreadsheets	Starter, $39/user/month	Intake, routing, basic two-column quoting, unlimited revisions, three leakage metrics
10 to 60 people, two or more estimators, real quote volume	Professional, $49/user/month	Four-column buildup, quantity breaks, margin guardrails, approval engine, PO OCR, all six leakage metrics
Multi-plant, ITAR or defence work, SSO required	Enterprise, $99/user/month + $2,000 platform fee	Multi-entity, immutable audit log, ITAR and Buy America modules, 2-hour SLA

Most job shops with two or more estimators want Professional from the start, because margin guardrails and quantity breaks are the two features that pay for the difference within a quarter. A single-estimator shop moving off spreadsheets is genuinely well served by Starter.

Honesty

When we are the wrong choice for a job shop

You run high-volume repeat production off a fixed catalogue — your cost is known, your problem is scheduling, and an ERP serves you better
You need production scheduling, capacity planning and shop-floor data collection — we do none of those and are not building them
You are a single-product manufacturer with a configurator and option rules — that is a CPQ problem, not an RFQ problem
Your quoting is genuinely automated from geometry on a narrow process like flat laser cutting — a geometry-based instant quoter will beat us on that specific job
You have one person, quoting four RFQs a month, and a spreadsheet that works — the three-user minimum makes us poor value for you

What this is not

This is not an ERP, MRP, CAD, BOM, or advanced CPQ system — it manages customer RFQs, quotes, follow-ups, and order handoff.

Questions job shop owners ask

No. Your ERP runs the floor: scheduling, routings, work in process, inventory, shop-floor data collection. It is generally poor at the customer-facing half — the RFQ that arrived this morning, the quote revision history, the follow-up nobody made. We take that half and hand the confirmed order to your ERP by connector or webhook. Shops that try to run quoting in a job shop ERP usually end up back in a spreadsheet within a year.

See a live quote draft built from a real RFQ

Fourteen days, no credit card, sample data pre-loaded. If it does not fit your shop, we will tell you in the first call.