Velocity CNC, a machine shop focused on prototypes and quick-turnaround work, faced a significant barrier to their growth: a manual quoting process that was inefficient and led to missed business opportunities. By integrating Uptool’s AI-powered quoting platform, Velocity CNC transformed its quoting workflow, reducing the time spent on quotes from up to ten hours a week to just one. Ensuring that 100% of incoming jobs are now quoted in a timely manner.

The Challenge: Manual Bottlenecks & Opportunity Cost

Velocity CNC focuses primarily on five-axis CNC milling, CNC turning, and deburring. The machine shop serves high-demand industries, such as automotive prototypes and aerospace components for customers who need parts urgently. To effectively serve their customers, the old methods of quoting were a massive bottleneck.

Like many small machine shops, Velocity CNC relied on manual processes such as excel data entry, a physical notepad, sifting through multiple email inboxes, and manual calculator entry. These disparate processes resulted in multiple operational inefficiencies:

1. Missed Business Opportunities: Because the quoting process was so daunting and stressful, Dillon frequently delayed quotes or skipped them entirely, resulting in significant missed work and lost jobs to faster competitors.

2. Time-Intensive Quoting: Estimating a single part could take 30 minutes; a quote with 10–15 parts would wrap up hours of unbilled time.

3. Material Lead-Time Delays: The quoting process was often stalled for days while waiting for external material quotes.

The Solution: Automating with Uptool AI-powered quoting

Uptool updated Velocity’s process with a user-friendly platform that simplified and organized the quoting process. According to Dillon, the platform was easy to adopt, and felt supported by Uptool’s customer success team.

Feature	Previous Process	With Uptool
Data Organization	Fragmented notes across emails, excel sheets, word documents, and physical papers.	Simplified and unified interface where the user can easily preview entire RFQ parts. The dashboard keeps data organized, and provides native communication with customers.
Response Speed	Quotes often took hours, leading to missed jobs.	Quotes are completed in "minutes," allowing for immediate response to RFQs, and more contracts to be won.
Material Estimation	Manually assessing part sizes and waiting days for external material quotes.	Instant calculated dimensions, estimates of material costs from Uptool’s database.
Calculation Accuracy	Manual calculations and institutional knowledge limit to one person .	Customizable setup, runtimes, and rates. These values are saved and automatically assigned, removing the need for "crude" manual entry.

The Results: 10x Quote Speed and Record-Breaking Sales

Since implementing Uptool, Dillon has reframed his view of quoting, from being a source of stress, to becoming a reliable and consistent part of his daily routine. The impacts are abundant:

• Reduced Administrative Stress: The software reduces the cognitive load of trying to keep complex, multi-part jobs organized

  • “It just simplifies your job so much. It's so worth it…everything's organized and you don't miss anything…”

• Massive Time Savings: Quoting time has been slashed from 8–10 hours per week down to just 1 hour

  • “I'd say in a week I had 8 to 10 hours of quoting…now I'm probably at an hour…I mean that's huge, cut my quoting time down 10 times"

• 100% Quote Capture: Velocity no longer misses out on work due to quoting delays

  • “We're at the point now where 100% of things I get to quote get quoted unless I just straight up don't want the job."

• Booming Growth: Following the implementation, 2025 was a "booming year," with sales 

  • “This year's been my biggest year as far as sales. I got to imagine a decent portion of that reflected in Uptool.”