Why we will not quote your battery program in 24 hours.
Some of our competitors will quote a 100-kWh battery enclosure run on the same day you send them the print. We will not. We typically take three to five business days, sometimes longer if the program is unusual.
I want to explain why, because the difference between a 24-hour quote and a 5-day quote is meaningful — and the answer is not “we are slower than the other guys.” It is that we use those days to do work that the 24-hour shops are not doing.
What we do during a quote cycle
An incoming RFQ at Lookout goes through five stages before we send a number back to you:
- Engineering review of the print. Two engineers — usually a senior and a junior — read every drawing and every spec. They flag anything ambiguous, anything unbuildable as drawn, and anything that looks like a copy-paste error from a similar program. We send these clarifications back to you before we cost.
- Process planning. Which machines run which features, in which order, with which workholding. This is the difference between a part that costs $48 to make and one that costs $112 — and we cannot fake it from a glance.
- Supplier sourcing on materials. If your part is in 7075 plate or in some specialty alloy, the cost of that material is the lion’s share of the unit cost. We do not assume; we get a real quote from our mill suppliers.
- Tolerance analysis. Some tolerances on a battery enclosure are real and some are inherited from a CAD template that nobody updated. We tell you which ones we think are which, and you decide what to relax.
- Schedule fit-check. When can we actually deliver against current commitments. A “yes we can ship in 8 weeks” that is not real is worse than a “12 weeks is honest” — for both of us.
What a 24-hour quote actually means
A 24-hour quote on a 100-kWh battery enclosure means one of two things. Either the shop has a black-box pricing tool that produces a number from the bounding box and the material — which means the number is a guess that they will revise later (usually upward, after you have committed) — or they have done the work and are very, very fast and very, very expensive.
I have done a lot of analysis on what 24-hour quotes look like in our market. The pattern is clear: the as-quoted number and the as-shipped invoice diverge by 18% on average, and on more than a third of programs the divergence is over 30%. That is the cost of speed.
When we will go faster
For existing customers on programs we already understand, we can turn quotes around in 24 to 48 hours. For new programs we will be a few days slower, and we will use those days to make sure the number we send you is the number you actually pay.
That is the trade. We think it is the right trade.
— Maya Pham, Founder & President