Metal fabrication quoting startup lowers the barrier to entry

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At this year’s FABTECH, representatives from a startup called Stella Source will be walking attendees through a new nesting, estimating, and quoting platform with a unique entry-level price tag: free.

“When we began with this project, we asked ourselves, ‘Is there an opportunity for us to create a space where we can help strengthen partnerships, rather than eroding them with races to the bottom.” That was Lindsay Sutton, PhD, vice president of strategy and experimentation at the Birmingham, Ala.-based company behind the platform. “Instead of having really robust engines for nesting and quoting locked up behind demos, what if we made it simple so you could do it yourself, and we gave it away for free?”

The online platform offers nesting and quoting capabilities for straightforward jobs, like a single part geometry nested on a sheet, or on a linear nest for structural shapes and tube destined for the band saw or similar equipment. It then will offer paid tiers for more complex work—all of which will be detailed as part of a road map Stella plans to release at the show.

“We believe that the entire industry will be healthier if there’s a certain, reasonable extension of toolsets available to everyone, to level up everybody,” said Wes Spencer, vice president of product development.

A series of pop-ups a new user sees to configure the system asks for cutting and other processing speed data as well as other information to develop machine rates and labor rates. As subscribers move up to paid tiers, they’ll be able to incorporate specifics like machine tech tables, times for secondary operations like manual deburring, and other minutiae.

The nesting and quoting platform doesn’t replace nesting platforms that take machine and process idiosyncrasies into account. But it does offer a baseline functionality, and even the free version incorporates the basic quoting building blocks.

The software will also incorporate material price and availability. The goal, Spencer said, is to simplify quoting by consolidating the data. Quoting engineers might draw time data from ERP, cutting data from third-party nesting software, and a raw material price, often obtained by reaching out to suppliers via email, phone, or (even in 2023) the fax machine.

“All that slows down the entire quoting process,” Sutton said. “You essentially get a Ferrari stuck in traffic,” referring to the advanced manufacturing technology waiting for work that’s still going through a manual quoting process.

At this writing, the platform focuses on first-stage processing—cutting. Additional quoting capabilities for secondary processes like forming, welding, and other downstream processes are on the horizon. Today, though, users can start with a quote for cutting, generated by Stella, then add downstream processes separately. The company’s road map includes breaking apart assemblies and performing multipart nesting on the fly.

The core of the system goes back to that initial sign-up, when fabricators enter the variables so that the system can create an accurate quote. “The process in which that happens,” Spencer said, “is what we’re most excited about.”

A quote summary details the total price and estimated net profit. Stella Source

The onboarding wizard needs to know the material, of course. It also asks for what costs a shop wants to assign to a specific work center rate, then the margin they want to achieve. From here, they select the wattage and tech table that’s appropriate for the machine they have, as well as other constraints like length setups or deburring times.

As Spencer explained, “We have these in-app options that allow a reasonable quote to get out the door quickly.” He added that such quotes will be very accurate, but won’t go so far as to account for every minute cost down to the penny, either. “In my experience, that just slows the process down. And besides, a quote designed for incredible accuracy isn’t so accurate when it meets the realities of the shop floor. You might have accounted for a 30-minute setup time, but the shop supervisor might have had no choice but to pull the operator off a machine to go unload a truck. It happens.”

At the same time, the platform should help quoting situations at the other end of the spectrum, where a shop might quickly throw out a number without really knowing what its true costs are. After all, as machines get faster, secondary and ancillary processes begin to consume more time. As sources explained, good quoting needs to account for that.

“We give a lot of autonomy to users to reflect those times,” Spencer said. “We want to reflect real setup times, the real sheet changeover times. You tell us what those values are for the machines and automation you have, and we input it on our side, and that becomes part of the overall cost calculation.”

Again, some of this detail will be available only on paid tiers. That said, certain basics will be available even on the free tier.

“We believe that the entire industry will be healthier if there’s a certain, reasonable extension of toolsets to everyone, to level up everybody,” Spencer continued. “Too many in our industry use pen and paper and homegrown calculators to estimate work that’s being placed on $2 million pieces of equipment. There’s such a polarity between the sophistication in which parts are made in the shop and the method in which that work is quoted.

“A friend of mine who recently purchased a fab shop was reviewing a $1 million order the business had recently closed prior to the acquisition,” Spencer said. “He asked, ‘OK, you got the job. Now, what are the margins on it?’ They didn’t know.”

The online quoting platform works from data the fabricator provides, including data from the initial setup that incorporates all time consumed from the process, including the handling time. To quote the forming, the software works with bend calculators that incorporate bend length, number of bends, part size and weight, and part flips. Once the order is run, the system can order materials automatically from a supplier of choice.

Some elements will remain manual in the short term, like being aware of the air bending capabilities of a shop’s press brake tooling library. Still, quoting engineers with a cheat sheet on their desktop can catch those problems easily enough. The idea is to eliminate manual spreadsheet or pen-and-paper tasks to get a quote out the door.

Spencer added that the design behind the Stella platform keeps it deliberately separate from all activities that occur after a bid is accepted. Certain technologies, like a new laser or plasma system, do lower costs, and the quoting platform accounts for that. But it doesn’t delve into production nesting or in-depth bend simulation. Those services, he said, can add value after the job has been won. The trick is for quoting to be robust enough so engineers working with those won orders don’t run into unexpected (and perhaps prohibitively expensive) surprises.

Stella’s goal isn’t to eliminate all human intervention between the initial quote and the first laser or plasma cut, just the manual activity that makes quoting slow and inconsistent.

With Stella Source (and other quoting software platforms, for that matter), the thinking is that shop quoting methods really shouldn’t be entirely unique. It’s math, after all, and not accounting for costs in a mathematically sound way can be risky. Fabricators across the industry have machines to amortize. They have material, labor, and overhead costs that must be accounted for. The costing formulas are pretty standard. It’s the figures that go into those formulas that set an operation apart.