The ask, as we heard itThe quote starts inside someone else's document.
A request for quotation arrives as a spec sheet - a PDF or a spreadsheet, laid out however that customer lays things out - and somewhere inside it sits a bill of materials. Nothing can be priced until those line items are in the manufacturer's own template: item, make, part number, quantity, unit of measure.
So a person opens each file, finds the BOM, and moves it across by hand, cell by cell. Enquiries arrive faster than the people available to attend to them, which means the speed of quoting is set not by engineering judgment but by data entry.
Heard from an engineered-components manufacturer quoting into regulated industries. Paraphrased, like everything on this map.