The three RFQ mistakes that cost fabrication estimators the bid.

Most estimators price an RFQ from a printed drawing and a highlighter. They spend forty minutes reading twelve dimensions, three bend callouts, a finish spec buried in the title block, and a WPS symbol on page two — then another forty retyping each number into a spreadsheet and pasting it into the quote line by line. Every revision mark is another chance to drop a digit, miss a decimal, or forget a weld leg the buyer assumed was standard. On a fourteen-line gate frame, one missed decimal in the bend allowance costs the shop the quarter.

The second mistake is older: pricing consumables against yesterday's number. The estimator quotes on last Tuesday's HR coil spot, last Friday's aluminum bar, last week's argon and CO₂ contract rate. The mill ships Wednesday at the new spot. The rod invoice arrives Thursday at a different basis. The quote — printed, signed, on the buyer's desk — is underwater before the first weld is laid. The shop doesn't see a loss line. The quarter just quietly underperforms.

The third mistake is the one the buyer notices first. An RFQ lands at 4:42 PM. The estimator sees it Wednesday morning between two flags and a back-charge. The afternoon slot on the press brake is already booked. The bid wasn't lost because the price was wrong. It was lost because the quote arrived four hours too late to matter — six hours of pricing isn't worth six hours of work, it's worth the first-shift floor slot the buyer seated somebody else into.

The three stack. A stale HR coil number, multiplied by a re-keyed line, sent through a slow reply, is an underwater quote out the door before the estimator has had coffee. The rework loop that follows — late quote, reschedule, re-cut, re-print — eats the margin on the next job before the original ships. None of those steps live in the same system. Each one is its own thread: drawing → spreadsheet → phone call → whiteboard. None of them sees the others' numbers.

The first thing Arcvigil runs is OCR — not a generic PDF reader, but a domain reader trained on the drawings a welding shop actually sees: revision marks, WPS callouts, finish specs buried in the title block, the count of bends and the leg length on a gate frame. The same drawing the estimator worked over with a highlighter for forty-five minutes is read end-to-end in seconds. AI pre-fill then prices consumables against today's HR coil, aluminum, and feed-gas commodity number and lays out an itemized estimate with one margin posture for the owner to overrule. The estimator opens the line items already priced against today's number — not last Tuesday's.

Then Arcvigil unifies the quote with the schedule. The same agent that reads the drawing also seats the job on a slot the schedule already knows — welders certified, on shift, inside the radius the shop actually covers. The buyer doesn't wait for the estimator to walk back from the brake with a clipboard. They get a priced quote, a flagged line or two, and a held slot. Six hours becomes ninety minutes. The first-shift floor slot the buyer would have handed to a competitor stays on your board.

None of that replaces the estimator. The pre-fill routes anything it isn't confident on — a finish spec outside the standard set, a commodity spike worth a human eye, a weld procedure the shop hasn't run in a quarter — straight into the estimator queue. The estimator still signs every customer concession. They just stop typing, stop chasing yesterday's spot, and stop losing the slot to a faster shop. Arcvigil holds the margin posture the owner wrote down on Monday, on every line that ships out.