From CAM to Quoting: Breaking Through Your Shop’s Bottlenecks | Ep. 546

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

The RFQs are coming in. Your machines have capacity. But the quotes are waiting on the same handful of people who are already busy keeping the shop running. Quoting takes experience, eats up valuable time, and comes with an especially frustrating reality: much of that effort goes into jobs you’ll never win. And when a purchase order comes back immediately, your first thought might be, “What did we miss?”

Recorded live at IMTS, we welcome CloudNC co-founder Theo Saville back to MakingChips, alongside Jason Bowes, to talk about this hidden bottleneck—and how AI could help relieve it. Building on CAM Assist, their AI tool for automating repetitive CAM programming tasks, CloudNC is expanding into quoting and estimating. Their approach starts with preparing the quote, surfacing risks, and generating an initial routing so an experienced person can review the work instead of building everything from scratch.

With more than 1,000 shops now using CloudNC’s technology, Theo and Jason share what they’ve learned since Theo’s previous appearance, including lessons from running their own aerospace and defense shop. We discuss why quote turnaround matters, where chasing precision becomes counterproductive, and how estimates, programming decisions, and actual cycle times should inform one another.

We also revisit Theo’s original ambition: making CNC manufacturing as simple as submitting a part and pressing go. How close are we? What still needs to happen? And how do you earn the trust of experienced machinists who will be responsible for the results? With growing demand putting pressure on shops to deliver faster, this conversation explores where AI can help today—and what it will take to go further.

What’s Covered in this Episode

• (1:11) Buyers show up at IMTS with real shopping lists
• (1:54) Why metal parts take 10 weeks and what CloudNC set out to fix
• (3:38) CAM Assist, an AI that gets programming 70 to 80% of the way
• (4:53) Jason on sleeping on the shop floor and why a real shop matters
• (5:59) Why quoting is the natural next step after automated programming
• (6:50) Ground Control automates FAI generation and PO review
• (7:30) Why CloudNC built its own shop to shrink the problem
• (9:43) From beta to over a thousand customers, starting in the US
• (10:44) What the workflow looks like from RFQ to CAM to inspection
• (13:08) The owner as bottleneck and the E-Myth trap
• (16:38) Find Kennametal at IMTS and the Next Level Shop
• (17:28) Running a shop on the software: ones and twos, and first over the line
• (19:55) Don’t over-engineer the quote, just win the work
• (21:57) What a day looks like with a quote agent, CAM Assist, and ERPs
• (24:51) Increase spindle uptime with Hennig Workflow
• (25:41) Estimated targets vs. actual part targets
• (28:55) Lightweight quoting vs. full toolpath calculation
• (30:05) Milling today, lathes on the roadmap
• (31:34) The goal: lift the ceiling from 20 machines to over 100
• (32:51) Can’t I just vibe code this?
• (37:15) Let your website answer buyer questions with Navu
• (38:28) Using AI to flag red flags on a print instead of quoting it
• (44:28) Where vibe coding does make sense

Resources Mentioned

• Ground Control
• Kennametal
• Hennig Workflow
• Navu
• ProShop ERP
• IMTS

Connect with Theo and Jason of CloudNC

• Connect with Theo on LinkedIn
• Connect with Jason on LinkedIn
• CloudNC

Connect with MakingChips

• Website
• On Facebook
• On LinkedIn
• On Instagram
• On Twitter
• On YouTube