How steel fabricators cut RFQ turnaround from days to the next shift.

An enquiry lands at 4:42 PM on a Tuesday, just past the last truck out. The estimator sees it Wednesday morning between two flags and a back-charge — and by then the afternoon floor slot on the press brake is already booked. The job didn't die because the price was wrong. It died because the quote arrived four hours too late to matter.

The same enquiry, this time priced Friday afternoon against last Tuesday's HR coil number. The mill ships on Tuesday at the new spot, the rod invoice lands at a different basis, and the quote — printed, signed, and out the door — is already underwater before the first weld is laid. A shop with a tight margin posture loses that margin entirely to re-roll timing.

And then there is the queue. A buyer writes on Saturday morning about fourteen-line gate frames; a different buyer writes at 8:01 PM Sunday about a structural skid; by Monday morning the estimator opens an inbox holding twenty-three RFQs, half of them with versioned drawings attached. The shop owner watches the estimator drink coffee and triage, and thinks: we lost the fastest one before we even saw it.

The first thing that runs is OCR. Not a generic PDF-to-text extractor — a domain reader trained on the drawings a welding shop actually sees. Revision marks on page three, weld callouts against a WPS symbol, a finish spec buried in the title block, the count of bends and the leg length on a gate frame. The same draw-and-redline that the estimator spends forty-five minutes on with a highlighter and a coffee is read end to end in seconds.

Then AI pre-fill takes over. The agent matches the read against your standard stock list, prices the consumables against today's steel, aluminum, and feed gas commodity numbers, and lays out an itemized estimate with one margin posture for the shop owner to overrule. The labour hours come from your certified-procedure library, not from a chat-bot's guess. The quote is the one your estimator would have written on a good Tuesday morning — minus the four cups of coffee and the spreadsheet re-key.

None of that replaces the estimator. The pre-fill flags anything it isn't confident on — a finish spec outside the standard set, a weld procedure the shop hasn't run in a quarter, an inbound price the agent wants a human to watch — and routes those line items straight into the estimator queue. The estimator still signs every customer concession, still sets the margin posture for the week, and still owns the relationship. They just stop doing the typing.

Margin posture, customer concessions, certifications that don't sit in the standard library — that's still the estimator. Arcvigil handles the typing, the commodity refresh, the schedule routing, the daily P&L. The estimator handles the parts of the job that earn the customer a second quote. A few trust signals we'd lean on: