One of the goals of Quoto is to lower the amount of waste in manufacturing. By waste, I don't mean scrap metal; I mean machines that are sitting idle with nothing to do.
From the perspective of Quoto, we want to find the most under-utilized manufacturers. These manufacturers help us get the customer the lowest price and quickest lead time. The manufacturer is also excited because they don't have idle machines, a costly problem. Everyone gets what they want. That is a very powerful thing. We aim to harness that power (for good, of course) to increase the accessibility of industrial manufacturing to small businesses and individuals. Making things is always costly, but we aim to deliver a service of taking the headache out of it and hopefully add only a small financial cost to alternative sourcing (how much is your time worth?).
By creating an overlay on top of existing infrastructure, we create a more dynamic distribution of work. At the end of a week, we ask how much spare processing time our manufacturers have for the upcoming week. By getting their schedule, we can take orders and forecast remaining supply without always asking the manufacturers pricing and lead time. In a way, we are the brokers in a futures market for manufacturing process capacity.
The trick to being an effective intermediary, in this case, requires us to speak manufacturing language. When we get an order for a part, we need to determine what processes it requires, and then determine how much time for each of those processes. Once we know that, then we look to the network for pricing of those processes. Unfortunately, we do not have any magical way to decompose a part into a process list. To start, we will be relying on years of experience. However, as this company grows, we are going to start codifying as many things as we can. That way, someday we will have a magical way to determine the cost for any part, at current rates, instantly. However, we do not have the funding to write the hundreds of thousands of lines of code that would require. So bear with us in the early stages! As you can see we are offering simple, specific processes to start.
I've always hated the adage "It's not what you know, but who you know," because of its accuracy. By building our network, we take care of the "who you know" so you can focus on the "what you know."