Honestly I don't have a good answer yet. Freight is the part I know the least about, and it might be the thing that kills this. I do know that cut pieces bundle onto LTL a lot more easily than 24 foot sticks do, but I won't know real numbers until I'm quoting freight on live orders. Ask me again in six months.
Even if an estimating tool comes up with a higher price, as long as they can reduce the time to do a quote, it helps.
I think problem here is thinking that eliminating the cost of the manpower to do the estimate will bring cost down enough to do the job.
When really, they need to introduce a premium for small/odd jobs. A lot of people understand that small/odd orders are going to cost more. So a tool to efficiently get them a small/odd cost is still good. The order is going to cost more, but if you are ordering small/odd, you accept that.
The goal is to get the companies to have a tool that is efficient enough to even take peoples calls.
Yep, Nox is doing this for aluminum plate and is doing it well. They're proof the model works. I'm doing tube, which is a different problem, with different suppliers, different saws, and 1D nesting instead of 2D. Agreed we need more of these.
