For machine shops

Machine shop software for the person who runs the floor and quotes at night

Twelve people, four machines, one estimator who is also the owner, the foreman and the person the vendor calls. Quoting starts at a quarter to nine and stops when the arithmetic stops being trustworthy.

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Diagram titled "A machine shop's quoting loop", 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 machine shops where the owner is also the estimator. It rebuilds a quote from the last comparable part instead of a blank sheet, costs each machine group at its own posted rate, and runs six checks on the finished quote before it goes out at nine at night.

A job shop with two estimators has a triage problem. A twelve-person machine shop has a different one: there is exactly one person who can price the work, and that person spent the day fixing a crashed setup, chasing bar stock that did not arrive, and talking to a customer who walked in without calling.

Everything below is designed around that constraint. Not more features for the estimator to configure — fewer decisions, more reuse, and a set of checks that catch what a tired person misses.

The evening

Where quoting actually happens

A representative twelve-person shop with a 3-axis cell, a 5-axis machine, two lathes and a manual section.

On the floor: 7:00am to 5:30pm; Setups, a crash on the Haas, a supplier who did not ship, and two customers who walked in.
Quoting starts: About 8:45pm; At the kitchen table, on a laptop, from a spreadsheet last edited in a hurry.
RFQs waiting: 6 to 9; Two of which arrived Monday and are now four days old.
Realistic output: 3 quotes; Before the arithmetic stops being trustworthy, which is the actual limit and nobody admits it.

Rates

Seven cost centres, not one blended shop rate

A blended rate overprices your manual work and underprices your 5-axis. Both cost you, in opposite directions, and neither shows up until you look at realised margin by part family.

Machine group or operation	Costed as	Rate treatment
3-axis vertical mill	Setup + run minutes	Its own posted rate
5-axis machining centre	Setup + run minutes	A different rate — usually 1.7 to 2.4 times the 3-axis rate
CNC lathe with live tooling	Setup + run minutes	Its own rate; sub-spindle work changes the setup, not the rate
Swiss	Setup + run minutes	Long setup, low run — the amortisation curve is the whole quote
Manual mill and lathe	Setup + run minutes	Cheap per hour, expensive per part, and still needed for one-offs
Inspection and CMM	Fixed or per-piece	Costed explicitly where a customer requires a first article report
Deburr and finishing	Per piece	The line most often left out of a tired estimate

A 5-axis hour and a manual mill hour are not the same number. The buildup keeps them separate so a quote heavy in 5-axis time carries the burden the machine actually costs to own and run.

Reuse

Four steps that turn ninety minutes into twenty

A machine shop's most valuable asset in the quoting seat is its own history, and in most shops that history is unreachable.

Search before you build — Type the material, diameter and length and see the last three comparable parts with their accepted price and actual buildup.
Clone and adjust — Copy the closest buildup, change the run minutes and the material buy, and the quote is done in twenty minutes rather than ninety.

The floor gets checked — Where the same part ran and your ERP reported actual hours, the difference between quoted and actual is on the part record.
Requote prompts — Repeat parts still priced off a costing built before the last material move are listed, with the current cost delta shown.

Guardrails

Six checks that run before a quote leaves at 9:40pm

A plating or anodize callout on the print with no outside-service line on the quote
Deburr and inspection time missing on a part with a tight surface finish requirement
Material priced at last year's number when bar stock has moved
A margin below your own floor for that part family
A lead time inside your current backlog for that machine group
A price below what the same customer accepted for the same part six months ago

None of these block the send. You can quote below the floor with a reason recorded, and sometimes you should — to hold a customer, to fill a gap on a machine, to buy your way into a family of parts. What matters is that it was a decision at the time rather than a discovery at the end of the quarter.

The missing outside-service check is the one that pays for the software fastest. A plating callout at $4 a part on a 500-piece order is $2,000 that walks out of the door in a line nobody typed.

Honesty

When we are the wrong choice for a machine shop

You want automated pricing straight from a STEP file — we do not do geometry-based quoting and will not pretend to
You need scheduling, capacity planning, tool crib management or machine monitoring — that is an ERP and an MDC system, not us
You are a two-person shop quoting four jobs a month — the three-user minimum makes us bad value and a spreadsheet is honestly fine
You run production volumes off a fixed part catalogue with known costs — your problem is the floor, not the front office
You need AS9100 or CMMC certification from your software — we ship an immutable audit log, but we are the CRM, not the certifier

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 machine shop owners ask

Two things. The quote gets built from history rather than from a blank sheet, which is where the time goes. And the guardrails catch what a tired person misses at half past nine — the missing plating line, the deburr time, the material price that has moved. Neither of those is glamorous. Together they take a three-quote evening to five or six quotes with fewer mistakes in them.

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.