The spreadsheet problem
Spreadsheets are genuinely good tools, which is exactly why they end up holding together critical manufacturing workflows well past the point where they should. An RFQ tracker that started as a simple list becomes a tangle of manual formulas, a costing sheet gets copied and modified for every quote with no single source of truth, and production reporting depends on someone manually compiling numbers at the end of every shift. None of this is really a spreadsheet problem — it’s a sign the workflow has outgrown a single shared file.
What gets built instead
- RFQ management — a shared system for tracking every enquiry from first contact through engineering review to quotation, replacing an email inbox or a shared tracking sheet.
- Costing systems — structured, editable cost roll-ups for material, tooling, machining and secondary operations, calculated consistently instead of rebuilt by hand per quote.
- Production dashboards — visibility into what’s actually happening on the floor without a manual end-of-shift compilation.
- Purchase and inventory analytics — clearer visibility into spend and stock patterns than a static spreadsheet can easily provide.
- CRM scoped to manufacturing — customer records that build from quoting and production activity already happening, instead of a separate system nobody keeps updated.
- Workflow and approval automation — role-based sign-off that mirrors how a quoting or production decision actually gets made on your floor.
Built around your actual workflow
The starting point for any of this is understanding exactly how your team currently works — which steps are manual, where data gets re-entered, and where errors or delays actually happen — rather than starting from a generic feature list. InFaktory is a concrete example of this applied to a die-casting RFQ and quotation workflow specifically.
Where this connects to everything else
Manufacturing software rarely exists in isolation from the rest of a business’s digital presence — an RFQ submitted through your website should ideally flow into the same system your team uses to track and quote it. See RFQ Automation and Manufacturing Quotation Software for two of the most common starting points for this kind of project.